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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

AND OTHEE 

ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES 



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THE 



MEANING OF EDUCATION 

Aim OTHER 

ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES 



BY 



:n"icholas mueeay butlee 

PROFESSOS OF PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION 
IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1898 

All rights reserved 






Znd COPY, 

1898« \€^n \'^% 






4817 



OOPTKIGHT, 1898, 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 



J. S. Gushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



The Meaning of Education .... 3 

What Knowledge is of Most Worth ? . . 37 v 

Is THERE A New Education? . . . .69 

Democracy and Education . . . . 99 K 

The American College and the American 

University ....... 125 

The Function of the Secondary School . 151 v^ 

The Reform of Secondary Education in the 

United States 187 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/meaningofeducati03butl 



INTRODUCTION 

The essays and addresses brought together 
in this volume give expression to convictions 
and opinions on the subject of education that 
have been presented during the past fifteen 
years, in one form or another, to hundreds of 
audiences, mainly of teachers, in almost every 
state of the Union. The belief that controls 
them all is threefold : first, that education, 
in the broad sen^e in which I use the term, is 
the most important of human interests, since 
it deals with the preservation of the culture 
and efficiency that we have inherited and with 
their extension and development ; second, that 
this human interest can and should be studied 
in a scientific spirit and by a scientific method ; 
and, third, that in a democracy at least an edu- 
cation is a failure that does not relate itself 
to the duties and opportunities of citizenshipc 
vii 



Viii INTRODUCTION 

Education is sharply distinguished, there- 
fore, from the far narrower field of instruc- 
tion, as that in turn is broader than the field 
of school-life. To give to education its right- 
ful place in our thinking involves relating it 
to the laws of life in general, and especially 
to those laws as viewed from the standpoint 
of the doctrine of evolution. This I have 
aimed to do by proposing an extension of the 
commonly received doctrine of infancy, which 
though as old as early Greek philosophy ,i owes 
its definite statement and exemplification to 
Mr. John Fiske. In this way the theory of 
education is given what it has hitherto lacked, 
a distinct relationship to the facts of organic 
and social evolution. 

A standard must next be sought by which 
the value of educational processes and influ- 
ences may be judged. I find this standard in 
the conclusion, common, I am confident, to the 
best philosophy and to the soundest science 

1 Butler, " Anaximander on the prolongation of infancy 
in man," in Classical Studies in Honor of Henry Drisler 
(New York: The Macmillan Co. for the Columbia Uni- 
versity Press, 1894). 



INTRODUCTION ix 

alike, that the facts of nature must be ex- 
plained, in the last resort, in terms of energy, 
and that energy in turn can be conceived only 
in terms of will, which is the fundamental 
form of the life of mind or spirit. 

I offer these two conclusions as the basis 
for an educational philosophy. With them in 
mind I have discussed a number of concrete 
problems that are of present importance not 
to teachers alone, but to thoughtful parents 
and to conscientious citizens. 

It is sometimes hastily objected that the 
attempt to formulate a scientific study of ed- 
ucation is impossible. This objection rests 
upon a misunderstanding as to what a science 
is. Science is wholly a matter of method ; 
it is knowledge classified, and nothing more. 
The knowledge so classified may be know- 
ledge of plants, or of heavenly bodies, or of 
the human body, or of forms of government, 
or of education. Only the sciences based upon 
mathematics are exact or lay claim to exact- 
ness ; all others are descriptive only, and wider 
experience or further observation may modify 
their conclusions at any time. A science of 



X INTRODUCTION 

education is analogous to a science of medicine. 
Both are built upon a group of ancillary sci- 
ences, and both arrive at conclusions that are 
only working hypotheses. With normal chil- 
dren, as with normal patients, these hypotheses, 
based as they are upon wide experience, require 
little or no modification ; in abnormal cases, 
however, they must be modified or sometimes 
even abandoned. Neither medicine nor edu- 
cation makes any pretense to exactness. 

It is highly important for the study of 
education that a consistent nomenclature be 
adopted and used, though for a variety of rea- 
sons this is a difficult task to accomplish. 
Bearing in mind this need, I have endeavored 
to mark off the several types or grades of 
educational institutions from each other, and 
to give to each its appropriate name. Many 
American educational problems that appear 
very complex, would become much simpler if 
the various institutions giving systematic in- 
struction were always called each by its right 
name. 

To the teachers of the United States, espe- 
cially to those who are members of the Na- 



INTRODUCTION xi 

tional Educational Association, I am under 
the deepest obligations for the encouragement 
and sympathy that have led to the publica- 
tion of these essays and addresses. To the 
patient criticism and the kindly suggestion of 
my friends and colleagues, Brander Matthews 
and George Rice Carpenter, I owe many im- 
provements in the form in which the papers 

now appear. 

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 

Columbia UNrvERSiTY, New York 
March, 1898. 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 



An Address 

delivered before the Liberal Club of Buffalo, New York 

November 19, 1896 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

Those who have an acquaintance, however 
cursory, with the history of human thought 
well remember how bitter and how persistent 
have been the controversies of philosophers and 
metaphysicians in respect to terms of everyday 
use. Discussions on such familiar words as 
"substance," "cause," "idea," and "matter" 
have shaken the schools for ages. It seems 
to be a fact that when a term is somewhat 
unusual and remote from our experience and 
our interest, we are apt readily to be able to 
assign to it a definite significance and a con- 
crete meaning ; but when it is a term with 
which we are familiar in our everyday experi- 
ence and conversation, we often feel its sig- 
nificance and its import, and yet find great 
difficulty in defining it accurately in logical 
or in scientific terms. 



4 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

I shall discuss the meaning of Infancy and 
Education just because the terms are familiar, 
because the ideas are commonplace, and be- 
cause, as it seems to me, we so often fail to 
grasp their profound and far-reaching signifi- 
cance. The point of view from which I shall 
speak of them is the one given us by that 
remarkable generalization which has come to 
be known as the doctrine of evolution, a the- 
ory which we all associate with the nineteenth 
century, but which, nevertheless, was seen by 
the thinkers of the ancient world, by the light- 
ning flashes of their genius, in what is after all 
very much the form in which the olear sun- 
light of modern scientific demonstration pre- 
sents it to us. The doctrine of evolution has 
illuminated every problem of human thought 
and human action. It is a mere truism to 
say that it has revolutionized our thinking ; 
but it is equally true that we have in very 
many cases failed to accept the consequences 
of the revolution and to understand them in 
all their important applications. It seems to 
me that in no department of our interest and 
activity is this failure more complete, speak- 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 5 

ing generally, than in that which relates to 
the great human institution of education. 

The two chief contributions that light up this 
doctrine from the point of view that I wish to 
occupy are those that were made by Mr. Al- 
fred Russell Wallace and by Mr. John Fiske. 
It was Mr. Wallace who pointed out, forty 
odd years ago, that the theory of evolution as 
applied to man could sustain itself only if it 
were acknowledged and admitted that there 
came a time in the history of animal types and 
forms when natural selection seized upon psy- 
chical or mental peculiarities and advantages 
and perpetuated them rather than merely phys- 
ical peculiarities and advantages. That is the 
first, and in a sense, perhaps, the greater of 
these contributions, for it has enabled us to un- 
derstand the place of man in the order of the 
cosmos. Then, in less than a generation, the re- 
markable insight of Mr. John Fiske explained 
for us on physiological and psychological 
grounds the part played by the lengthening 
period of infancy in the animal species. It is 
from that doctrine of Mr. Fiske that I take my 
point of departure in the present argument. 



6 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

We have come to understand that evolu- 
tion regards us all as individual centres of 
activity, influenced by our surroundings and 
reacting upon them. We have come to un- 
derstand that our physical, our mental, and 
our moral life is the gradual growth or de- 
velopment of what may be conceived of as a 
point travelling through an ever-widening 
series of circles, until, in this ripe and culti- 
vated age, the point has come to include 
within the circumference that it traces, all 
that we call the knowledge or acquirement 
or culture of the educated man. 

The doctrine of infancy, as it has been ex- 
plained to us, relates itself directly to that 
figure and to that method of explanation. If 
we contrast or compare the lower orders of 
animal life with the higher, and particularly 
with the human species, we are at once struck 
by the fact that in the lower orders of exist- 
ence there is no such thing as infancy. We 
observe that the young are brought into the 
world able to take care of themselves, to 
react upon their environment at the mere 
contact of air or food, to breatlie, to digest, 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 7 

and to live an individual existence. We are 
further struck by the fact, on examining the 
structure of animals of that kind, that there 
is no nervous system or organization present, 
except such as is necessary to carry on what 
are called reflex actions. There is no central 
storage warehouse ; there is nothing corre- 
sponding to the human brain ; and there is 
no action possible for animals of that type 
in which any considerable time can elapse 
between the impulse which comes in from 
the world without, and the responding or 
reacting movement or action on the part of 
the animal itself. Each of those animals 
lives the life of its parents. Each of those 
animals, young and old alike, performs cer- 
tain reflex actions with accuracy, with sure- 
ness, with despatch ; no one of those animals 
progresses, and none develops or has a his- 
tory. When we pass to animals of a higher 
order, however, there comes a time when our 
attention is attracted by those that act in an 
entirely different way. Their actions are more 
complex, more numerous, more subtile, more 
sustained ; and on turning again to the or- 



8 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

ganism that accompanies tliis and makes it 
possible, we see at once that there is an in- 
creased complexity of structure which accom- 
panies this increasing complexity of function. 
We find, as we study more highly organized 
types of animal existence, that, sooner or 
later, there comes a time when the offspring 
of a given animal comes into the world un- 
able to perform many of the functions that 
become possible for it later. It brings with 
it a host of developed reflex actions, but it 
also brings with it many undeveloped poten- 
tialities. Its organization is not complete 
at the moment of birth ; and a period of help- 
lessness or infancy, longer or shorter, must 
result. In passing from the highest of the 
lower animals to man, we reach a most im- 
portant stage in the development of infancy. 
In man we find the increasing bulk, and more 
than that, the increasing complexity, of the 
brain and central nervous system which ac- 
company the complex adjustments and actions 
that make up life. But though the human 
animal is born into the world complete as 
to certain series of reflex actions, its lungs 



THE MEANING Or EDUCATIOIf 9 

able to breathe, its heart to beat, its blood 
vessels to contract, its glands to secrete, an 
immense series of adjustments remains to be 
m.ade. While those adjustments are being 
made, there is a more or less prolonged period 
of helplessness or infancy^ 

The meaning of that period 'of helplessness 
or infancy lies, as I see it, at the bottom of 
any scientific and philosophical nnderstanding 
of the part played by education in human 
life. Infancy is a period of plasticity ; it is a 
period of adjustment ; it is a period of fitting 
the organism to its enTironment : first, physi' 
cal adjustment, and then adjustment on a far 
larger and broader scale. This fitting of the 
organism to its enyironment on the larger and 
broader scale is the field of education. In 
other words, nature and heredity haye so or- 
ganized one side of animal life that it is com- 
plete at the time of birth. A large series of 
adjustments to the world around us, the series 
of adjustments that in the case of man make 
up the life that is really worth liying, consti- 
tutes the life of the mind or spirit. At birth, 
those adjustments are not yet made and they 



10 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

have to be slowly and carefully acquired. We 
are even born into the world with our senses, 
"the windows of the soul," locked, uncoordi- 
nated, unadjusted, unable to perform what is 
eventually to be their function. It is a famil- 
iar fact that sight, hearing, and touch all have 
to be developed and trained and coeducated, 
taught to act together, before the infant can 
appreciate and understand the world of three 
dimensions in which adults live, and which they 
have supposed to be the only world known to 
the human consciousness. While that period 
of plasticity or adjustment lasts, there is natu- 
rally and necessarily a vast influence exerted, 
not only on the child but by the child. 

I think Mr. Fiske is undeniably correct in 
saying that the prolonged period of infancy 
which is necessary to bring about these ad- 
justments, lies at the foundation of the human 
family, and therefore at the foundation of 
society and of institutional life. The factor 
in history that has changed the human being 
from a gregarious animal to a man living in 
a monogamic family is, if anthropology and 
psychology teach us anything, unquestionably 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION H 

the child. During this long period of helpless- 
ness and dependence, the parents of the child 
are kept together by a common centre of inter- 
est; and the bonds of affection and interdepend- 
ence that are eventually to constitute the family 
are then permanently and closely knit. That 
period of mutual association and dependence of 
the parents extends at first over only eight, 
ten, or twelve years. If two, three, or four 
children are born to the same parents, it may 
extend over a period much longer ; it may last 
during one-third or even one -half of the aver- 
age life of man. Out of that centre of depend- 
ence and helplessness, the family, as we know it, 
has grown ; and it has been constituted, so far 
as we can explain it at all, by the lengthening 
period of infancy in the animal kingdom and 
in the human race. I might cite fact after 
fact in illustration of this, from the history of 
science and from natural history, were it not 
wholly unnecessary. It is one of the most 
profound generalizations of our modern science ; 
and it has enabled us to see to the very bottom 
of the meaning of education and to under- 
stand the biological significance of one of the 



12 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

most striking and imposing of social phe- 
nomena. 

This lengthening period of infancy is a 
period of plasticity. No animal that has not 
a period of infancy needs to be educated. 
Every animal that has a period of infancy can 
and must be educated. The longer the period 
of infancy the more education is possible for 
it ; and as our civilization has become more 
complex, as its products have become more 
numerous, richer, deeper, and more far-reach- 
ing, the longer we have extended that period 
of tutelage, until now, while the physiological 
period of adolescence is reached in perhaps four- 
teen or fifteen years, the educational period of 
dependence is almost twice as long. That is 
to say, the length of time that it takes for the 
human child in this generation so to adapt 
himself to his surroundings as to be able to 
succeed in them, to conquer them, and to make 
them his own, is almost, if not quite thirty years. 
The education in the kindergarten, the elemen- 
tary school, the secondary school, the college, 
the professional school, the period of appren- 
ticeship in the profession before independent 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 13 

practice can be entered upon, is in not a few 
cases, now twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty- 
eight, or even thirty years. 

The rich suggestion that this doctrine of Mr. 
Fiske and this conception of modern science 
have for us, seems to me to be this: — The 
entire educational period after the physical 
adjustment has been made, after the child can 
walk alone, can feed itself, can use its hands, 
and has therefore acquired physical and bodily 
independence, is an adjustment to what may 
be called our spiritual environment. After 
the physical adjustment is reasonably complete, 
there remains yet to be accomplished the build- 
ing of harmonious and reciprocal relations with 
those great acquisitions of the race that con- 
stitute civilization ; and therefore the lengthen- 
ing period of infancy simply means that we are 
spending nearly half of the life of each genera- 
tion in order to develop in the young some con- 
ception of the vast acquirements of the historic 
past and some mastery of the conditions of the 
immediate present. 

In other words, the doctrine of evolution 
teaches us to look upon the world around us 



14 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

— our art, onr science, our literature, our insti- 
tutions, and our religious life — as an integral 
part, indeed as the essential part, of our en- 
vironment ; and it teaches us to look upon 
education as the plastic period of adapting 
and adjusting our self -active organism to this 
vast series of hereditary acquisitions. So that 
while the child's first right and first duty is 
to adjust himself physiologically to his envi- 
ronment, to learn to walk, to use his hands 
and to feed himself, to be physically inde- 
pendent, there still remains the great outer 
circle of education or culture, without contact 
with which no human being is really either 
man or woman. The child receives first, and 
in a short series of years, his animal inheri- 
tance ; it then remains for us in the period 
of education to see to it that he comes into 
his human inheritance. When we compare 
the life of the lower animal, acting solely and 
entirely by reflex action and instinct, with the 
periods of infancy and of self-determined ac- 
tivity of the human being, developing by 
reflex action, instinct, and intelligence, we get 
some conception of the vast difference there 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 15 

is between what Descartes called the animal 
mechanism and what we may truly look upon 
as the activity of the human mind. 

This period of adjustment constitutes, then, 
the period of education ; and this period of 
adjustment must, as it seems to me, give us 
the basis for all educational theory and all 
educational practice. It must be the point 
of departure in that theory and that practice, 
and it must at the same time provide us with 
our ideals. When we hear it sometimes said, 
"All education must start from the child," 
we must add, "Yes, and lead into human 
civilization " ; and when we hear it said, on 
the other hand, that all education must start 
from the traditional past, we must add, " Yes, 
and be adapted to the child." We shall then 
understand how the great educational temple 
of modern times into which every civilized 
nation is pouring out its strength and its 
treasure, rests upon the two corner-stones 
of the physical and psychical nature of the 
child and the traditional and hereditary civili- 
zation of the race ; and how it is that the 
problem of the family, of the school, and of 



16 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

the home, is to unite those two elements so 
that each shall possess the other. We shall 
then have a conception of education which 
is in accord with the doctrine of evolution 
and which is in accord with the teachings of 
modern science and of modern philosophy. 

After the child comes into the enjoyment 
of his physical inheritance, he must be led by 
the family, the school, and the state into his 
intellectual or spiritual inheritance. The mo- 
ment that fact is stated in those terms it 
becomes absolutely impossible for us ever 
again to identify education with mere instruc- 
tion. It becomes absolutely impossible for us 
any longer to identify education with mere 
acquisition of learning ; and we begin to 
look upon it as really the vestibule of the 
highest and the richest type of living. It 
was the great thought of Plato, that inspired 
every word he ever wrote and that consti- 
tutes an important portion of his legacy to 
future ages, that life and philosophy are 
identical; but he used the word philosophy 
in a sense which was familiar to him and to 
his time, and for which we might very well 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION IT 

substitute, under some of its phases at least, 
the word education. Life and education are 
identical, because the period to which we tra- 
ditionally confine the latter term is merely the 
period of more formal, definite, determinate 
adjustment ; yet, just so long as life lasts and 
our impressionability and plasticity remain, we 
are always adapting ourselves to this environ- 
ment, gaining power, like Antseus of old, each 
time we touch the Mother Earth from which 
civilization springs. 

If education cannot be identified with mere 
instruction, what is it ? What does the term 
mean? I answer, it must mean a gradual 
adjustment to the spiritual possessions of the 
race. Those possessions may be variously 
classified, but they certainly are at least five- 
fold. The child is entitled to his scientific 
inheritance, to his literary inheritance, to his 
aesthetic inheritance, to his institutional in- 
heritance, and to his religious inheritance. 
Without them he cannot become a truly edu- 
cated or a cultivated man. 

He is entitled to his scientific inheritance. 
In other words, he is entitled to go out into 





18 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

nature, to love it, to come to know it, to under- 
stand it ; and he is entitled to go out into it, 
not only as the early Greek and Oriental 
thinkers went, with fear and trembling and 
worship, but he is entitled to go out into it 
armed with all the resources of modern scien- 
tific method and all the facts acquired by 
modern research. He is entitled to know how 
it was that we have passed from the world 
known to the heroes of the Iliad to the world 
as we know it to-day. Pie is entitled to know 
how the heavens have declared their glory to 
man, and how the worlds of plant and animal 
and rock have all come to unfold the story of 
the past and to enrich us with the thought and 
the suggestion of the intelligence, the design, 
the order that they manifest. There can be no 
sound and liberal education that is not based in 
part upon the scientific inheritance of the race» 
The learning of the multiplication table, the 
learning of the necessary preliminary defini- 
tions, the learning of the necessary methods of 
research and practice — all these are the lower 
steps of the ladder, the needful steps by 
which we must mount ; and yet they are the 



THE MEANING OE EDUCATION 19 

steps from which how often we fall back with- 
out having gained any vision whatever of the 
land to which they are supposed to lead ! The 
scientific inheritance is one of the very first 
elements of a modern liberal education, because 
it is that element which presents itself earliest 
to the senses of the child. It is the element 
with which he comes in immediate sense-con- 
tact ; to which he can be first led ; from which 
he may be made to understand and draw 
7 lessons of the deepest significance for his life 

f and for that adaptation which is his edu- 

cation. 

Next there is the vast literary inheritance, 
the phase of the past that mankind has during 
twenty-five hundred years most loved to dwell 
upon. It is the side that has captivated the 
imagination, enshrined itself in language, and 
brought itself closest to the heart of cultivated 
man, — going back to the earliest attempts at 
mythology and coming down to the great 
poetry and the great prose of the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries in modern tongues. 
We have gone so far as to call this aspect of 
civilization the "humanities," because most of 



20 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

all it seems to bear upon its surface the sig- 
nificance of tliat fine old word humanitas which 
was once the ideal of liberal education. *' Hu- 
manities " these studies undoubtedly are, but 
humanitas is a broader term still, and in its 
full significance must be made to include all 
our inheritance, scientific, aesthetic, institu- 
tional, and religious, as well as literary. Just 
as scientific method is the gate to the scientific 
inheritance and therefore must in essence at 
least be mastered, so language is the gate to 
the literary inheritance and must be mastered 
at the earliest opportunity. We are accus- 
tomed, as a rule, to estimate and weigh power 
and culture in terms of language. The mas- 
tery of various languages, the mastery even 
of the mother tongue, is often taken as the 
sole test of culture. That is our tribute to 
its great importance. We see how easily the 
mastery of a language, or of more than one, 
lends itself to this conception of education 
as an adaptation, as an adjustment, to the 
spiritual environment of the race. 

Language is the crystallized thought of the 
past. It contains in itself, in its products and 



THE MEANING OE EDUCATION 21 

its forms, in its delicate discriminations, its 
powers of comparison and abstraction, a record 
of the progress of the thought of the race. 
When we are plodding through dreary de- 
tails of grammar and of rhetoric we are again 
on the lower rungs of the ladder, the multi- 
plication table of the literary inheritance, 
the steps that must be taken if we are to 
come to understand what the great world- 
poets and seers have revealed to us. There- 
fore it is that we are to-day putting the 
literary inheritance side by side with the sci- 
entific in the very earliest years of the educa- 
tion of the child. In the education that is 
sometimes called " new," it will be found 
that the early linguistic exercises are almost 
always based upon something that is really 
worth knowing for its own sake. Our litera- 
tures the world over, ancient and modern, are 
so rich, so full of thought and feeling and 
action, that there is no time to waste in the 
merely formal exercises of grammatical drill 
upon lifeless material, when w^e may be occupy- 
ing ourselves, in those same exercises and for 
the same purpose of discipline, with material 



22 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

that enriches the human mmd and touches and 
refines the human heart. Modern education in 
its adjustments is bringing the child into his 
literary inheritance in a new spirit. That 
inheritance has always been before mankind. 
In the Middle Ages, in early modern educa- 
tion, in European education to-day, the study 
of language and literature is and has been the 
main element in instruction. It must always 
hold a prominent place in education, for it ad- 
mits of no substitute. Yet it is mere narrow- 
ness to say that this study alone is sufficient, 
and that it excludes everything else. It should 
come side by side with the scientific inheritance 
in the early life of the child, during the period 
of plasticity or education. 
-~^-^rhe third element in education is the aes- 
thetic inheritance, that feeling for the beautiful, 
the picturesque, and the sublime that has al- 
ways been so great a part of human life, 
that contributes so much to human pleasure 
and accentuates so much of human pain and 
suffering. The ancient Greeks understood and 
used it, but a false and narrowing philosophy 
thrust it out of life and education for cen- 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 23 

turies because it was supposed to antagonize 
the spiritual or religious life. It was believed 
that the spirit could be chastened only by 
privation and by pain, by tearing it away from 
one whole side of human civilization, and by 
insisting that the human heart should suppress 
its feeling, its longing for the ideal in the realm 
of feeling and of beauty. The closet philoso- 
phers could accomplish their end in education 
for a time, but they were utterly unable to sup- 
press the builders of the Gothic cathedrals 
or the Italian painters of the Renaissance, and 
they have been unable to suppress the artistic 
element in human life. To-day we find it 
coming back to occupy its appropriate place. 
We should no longer think of applying the 
word cultivated to a man or woman who 
had no aesthetic sense, no feeling for the beauti- 
ful, no appreciation of the sublime, because we 
should be justified in saying, on all psychologi- 
cal grounds, that that nature was deficient and 
defective. This great aspect of civilization, 
this great tide of feeling that ebbs and flows 
in every human breast, which makes even the 
dull and inappreciative peasant uncover his 



24 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

head as he passes through the wonderful gal- 
leries of the Vatican or the Louvre — this, 
too, is a necessary factor in adjusting our- 
selves to the full richness of human conquest 
and human acquisition. Unless we are to be 
mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, 
we should see to it that the sesthetic inheri- 
tance is placed side by side with the scientific 
and the literary in the education of the human 
child. To-day we find art creeping into the 
schoolroom ; instruction in color, in form, in 
expression is being given. The growing child 
is surrounded with representations of the 
classic in art, and so, unconsciously and by 
imitation, he is being taught to adapt and 
adjust himself to this once forgotten and now 
recovered element in human civilization; an 
element that certainly is, like the scientific and 
literary elements, an integral part of the child's 
inheritance. 

Then there is also the wonderful institu- 
tional inheritance, most wonderful of all, be- 
cause it brings us into immediate contact with 
the human race itself. This is the element of 
civilization before which we must, for the mo- 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 25 

ment, sink differences of scientific opinion, 
differences of literary appreciation, differences 
of sesthetic judgment, and in which we look 
upon individual man as but a member of a 
larger whole, in order to understand what 
human civilization really means. We have 
always had before us, in the history of civiliza- 
tion, two extreme types of thought and opinion 
as to human institutions. We have had the 
view typified in modern philosophy by Rous- 
seau, and wrought out in the streets of Paris 
from 1789 to 1794. This is, substantially, the 
view that every individual is sufficient unto 
himself. It is the view of the ancient Sophists, 
once combated by Socrates in the streets of 
Athens, that there are as many truths as there 
are men to perceive truth, and that each indi-- 
vidual is the sole arbiter of his own fortunes. 
This is what I may call the atomic view 
of human society, which would blow all of our 
institutional life into millions of atoms and 
deify each. That view has failed to work 
itself out successfully in history ; when it has 
had a momentary victory it has simply been 
because it came as a reaction against the 



26 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

tyranny of the opposite extreme. We have 
had the other extreme also. We have had the 
view which insists that no individual is of any 
consequence or importance in the presence of 
the mass ; the view that all individual peculi- 
arity, all individual power or acquisition, must 
be pressed down and trampled under foot for 
the advantage of the whole. We have seen it 
in the civilization of China in the interest of 
ancestor worship ; we have seen it in the civili- 
zation of India in the interest of the caste sys- 
tem ; we have seen it in the civilization of 
Egypt in the interest of the priestly class ; and 
we have seen those three civilizations wither 
and die. 

We have come to understand, again follow- 
ing the seed-thought of the Greeks, that the 
true line of institutional progress lies between 
the two extremes ; that that conception of our 
institutional life is the true one which regards 
each of us as a unit but still as a part of a 
larger unit, which regards each of us as en- 
titled to liberty but in subordination to law. 
We have come to regard this as the last les- 
son of a political philosophy that is based 



THE MEANING OE EDUCATION 27 

upon a study of human history and of human 
nature. The conception of liberty under the 
law, allowing a field for every human activity 
to develop and enrich itself without pulling 
down its fellow, all cooperating toward a com- 
mon end, typifies and explains, better than any 
extreme theory of philosopher or sciolist, the 
institutional life of the race. We look back 
and see how that institutional life has been 
developed. We see the right of private prop- 
erty, the common law, the state, the church, 
the freedom of the press, education, — one great 
institution after another emerging from the 
mist of indefiniteness and taking its part in 
the structure of our modern life; and we say 
at once that no liberal education can be com- 
plete that does not include some comprehension 
of all that. Unless the child understands that 
though he is an individual he is also a member 
of the body politic, of an institutional life in 
which he must give and take, defer and obey, 
adjust and correlate, and that without all this 
there can be no civilization and no progress, 
we are thrown back into the condition either 
of anarchy — the anarchy of Rousseau — or the 



28 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

collectivism and stagnation of China, India, and 
Egypt. We have wrested that institutional life 
from history and it is going to-day into the 
education of children all over the civilized 
world. In this way they are being given their 
institutional inheritance ; they are being given 
some insight not alone into their rights, which 
are so easy to teach, but into their duties, which 
are so easy to forget ; and the institutional life 
that carries with it lessons of duty, responsi- 
bility, and the necessity for cooperation in the 
working out of high ideals, is being put before 
children wherever sound education is given to- 
day, from the kindergarten to the university. 

Finally, there is the religious inheritance of 
the child. No student of history can doubt 
its existence and no observer of human nat- 
ure will undervalue its significance. We are 
still far from comprehending fully the pre- 
ponderant influence of religion in shaping our 
contemporary civilization ; an influence that is 
due in part to the universality of religion 
itself, and in part to the fact that it was, 
beyond dispute, the chief human interest at 
the time when the foundations of our present 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 29 

superstructure were being laid. It has played 
a controlling part in education till very re- 
cently, although it has too often played that 
part in a narrow, illiberal, and uninformed 
spirit. The progress of events during the 
nineteenth century, however, has resulted in 
greatly altering the relation of the religious 
influence in education, — at first to education's 
incalculable gain, and, more recently, to edu- 
cation's distinct loss. The growing tendency 
toward what is known as the separation of 
church and state, but what is more accu- 
rately described as the independence of man's 
political and religious relationships, and, con- 
currently, the development of a public educa- 
tional conscience which has led the state to 
take upon itself a large share of the responsi- 
bility for education, have brought about the 
practical exclusion of the religious element 
from public education. This is notably true 
in France and in the United States. In the 
state school system of France, all trace of 
religious instruction has been lacking since 
1882; and it is hard to dignify with the names 
influence or instruction the wretchedly formal 



30 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

religious exercises that are gone through with 
in American public schools. 

The result of this condition of affairs is 
that religious teaching is rapidly passing out 
of education entirely ; and the familiarity with 
the English Bible as the greatest classic of 
our tongue, that every cultivated man owes 
it to himself to possess, is becoming a thing 
of the past. Two solutions of the difficulty 
are proposed. One is that the state shall 
tolerate all existing forms of religious teach- 
ing in its own schools, time being set apart 
for the purpose. The other is that the state 
shall aid, by money grants, schools maintained 
by religious or other corporations. Neither 
suggestion is likely to be received favorably 
by the American people at present, because 
of the bitterness of the war between the 
denominational theologies. Yet the religious 
element may not be permitted to pass wholly 
out of education unless we are to cripple it 
and render it hopelessly incomplete. It must 
devolve upon the family and the church, then, 
to give this instruction to the child and to 
preserve the religious insight from loss. Both 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 31 

family and church must become much more 
efficient, educationally speaking, than they are 
now, if they are to bear this burden success- 
fully. This opens a series of questions that 
may not be entered upon here. It is enough 
to point out that the religious element of hu- 
man culture is essential ; and that, by some 
effective agency, it must be presented to 
every child whose education aims at complete- 
ness or proportion. 

The period of infancy is to be used by civil- 
ized men for adaptation along these five lines, 
in order to introduce the child to his intellectual 
and spiritual inheritance, just as the shorter 
period of infancy in the lower animals is used 
to develop, to adjust, and to co-ordinate those 
physical actions which constitute the higher 
instincts, and which require the larger, the more 
deeply furrowed, and the more complex brain. 

That, as it seems to me, is the lesson of biol- 
ogy, of physiology, and -of psychology, on the 
basis of the theory of evolution, regarding the 
meaning and the place of education in modern 
life. It gives us a conception of education 



32 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

which must, I am quite sure, raise it above 
the mechanical, the routine, the purely arti- 
ficial. We see that this period of prepara- 
tion is not a period of haphazard action, a 
period of possible neglect, or a period when 
time may be frittered away and lost, but 
that every moment of adjustment is precious 
and that every new adaptation and correlation 
is an enrichment not only of the life of the in- 
dividual but of the life of the race. For now 
we all understand perfectly well that this 
long period of infancy and adaptation, this 
period of plasticity and education, is that which 
makes progress possible. That is why it is 
entirely correct to say that each generation 
is the trustee of civilization. Each generation 
owes it to itself and to its posterity to protect 
its culture, to enrich it and to transmit it. 
The institution that mankind has worked out 
for that purpose is the institution known as 
education. When a child has entered into this 
inheritance, first physical, then sci^tific, liter- 
ary, sesthetic, institutional, and religious, then 
we use the word culture to signify the state 
that has been attained. 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 33 

The word culture is very modern. It is 
used in its present sense only during the latter 
portion of the eighteenth century and during 
our own. It owes its present significance 
largely to Goethe and to Herder, the two 
men who did most to make it familiar in its 
modern sense. But while the word may be 
new, the conception itself is old. It is the 
TTaiheia of the Greeks, the humanitas of the 
Romans ; and after all it expresses pretty much 
what the patrician Roman, dwelling in his 
country house, had in mind when he sent his 
boy, after giving him some instruction in agri- 
culture, in law, and in military duty, to the 
great city of Rome itself in order to obtain 
whanitas, city-ness. We have softened that 
word down until it means merely polished man- 
ner, but when the Romans first used it they 
meant by it pretty much what we mean by 
culture. The conception of culture is old, 
therefore ; it has always been before the ideal- 
ists of the human race from the earliest times. 
We have given to this new word rich, full, 
and ^diversified meaning, based, as I say, upon 
the knowledge of the child and upon the 



34 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

knowledge of the historic past. When we 
use it in that sense, we are using it, as we 
may properl}^ to indicate the ideal of our 
modern education. 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST 
WORTH ? 



Presidential Address 

delivered before the 

National Educational Association 

at Denver, Colorado, July 9, 1895 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST 
WORTH ? 

The student of history is struck with the 
complexity of modern thought. From the 
dawn of philosophy to the great Revival of 
Learning the lines of development are com- 
paratively simple and direct. During that 
period one may trace, step by step, the evolu- 
tion of the main problems of thought and 
action, and discover readily how the theories of 
the seers stood the test of application by the 
men of deeds. At Athens during the great 
fifth century the inner life was the chief part 
of life itself. In that age of the world life 
was simple ; and often, because of it. refine- 
ment and independence, more reflective than 
with us. Men's ideals were more sharply 
defined and more easily realizable. They did 
not doubt that the world existed for them and 
37 



38 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

their enjoyment. Even that relatively advanced 
stage of human culture of which Dante is the 
immortal exponent, believed, as Mr. John Fiske 
says,^ that "this earth, the fair home of man, 
was placed in the centre of a universe wherein 
all things were ordained for his sole behoof: the 
sun to give him light and warmth, the stars in 
their courses to preside over his strangely 
checkered destinies, the winds to blow, the 
floods to rise, or the fiend of pestilence to stalk 
abroad over the land — all for the blessing, or 
the warning, or the chiding, of the chief 
among God's creatures, Man." With such a 
conception as this, theory and practice could be 
closely related. In the ancient world it was 
not unusual to find the thought of the disciple 
guided implicitly by the maxim of the master. 
Tvcodi areavTov and Nil admirari were preached 
by the early philosophers in the confident be- 
lief that they could be practised by him who 
would. 

In these modern days all this is changed. 
Man has come to doubt not only his supremacy 
in the universe, but even his importance. He 
1 The destiny of man (Boston, 1887), p. 12. 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 39 

finds that, far from dwelling at the centre of 
things, he is but "the denizen of an obscure 
and tiny speck of cosmical matter quite invisi- 
ble amid the innumerable throng of flaming 
suns that make up our galaxy." A flood of 
new knowledge has appealed to human sympa- 
thy and interest, and has taxed them to the 
utmost. Galileo with his telescope has re- 
vealed to us the infinitely great ; and the com- 
pound microscope of Jansen has created, as out 
of nothing, the world of the infinitely small. 
Within a generation or two biology has been 
created ; and physics, chemistry, and geology 
have been born again. The first wave of 
astonishment and delight at these great revela- 
tions has been succeeded by one of perplexity 
and doubt in the presence of the wholly new 
problems that they raise. The old self-assur- 
ance is lost. Men first stumble, blinded by the 
new and unaccustomed light, and then despair. 
The age of the faith and assured conviction of 
Aquinas was followed by the bold and cynical 
scepticism of Montaigne ; and this in turn — 
for scepticism has never afforded a resting- 
place for the human spirit for more than a 



40 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

moment — has yielded to the philosophy of dis- 
enchantment and despair of a Schopenhauer 
and the morbidly acute and unsatisfying self- 
analysis of an Amiel. Already it is proclaimed 
by Nordau and his school that we are in an age 
of decadence, and that many of our contempo- 
rary interpreters of life and thought — Wag- 
ner, Tolstoi, Ibsen, Zola, the pre-Raphaelites — 
are fit subjects for an insane asylum. Man- 
kind is divided into warring camps, and while 
electricity and steam have bound the nations of 
the earth together, questions of knowledge and 
of belief have split up every nation into sects. 
In all this tumult it is difficult to catch the 
sound of the dominant note. Each suggested 
interpretation seems to lead us further into the 
tangled maze, where we cannot see the wood 
for the trees. Standards of truth are more 
definite than ever before ; but standards of 
worth are strangely confused, and at times 
even their existence is denied. 

Amid all this confusion, however, a light has 
been growing steadily brighter for those who 
have eyes to see. In our own century two 
great masters of thought have come forward, 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WOETH ? 41 

offering, like Ariadne of old, to place in our 
hands the guiding thread that shall lead us 
through the labyrinth — the German Hegel 
and the Englishman Herbert Spencer. And 
as the century closes, amid the din of other and 
lesser voices, we seem to hear the deeper tones 
of these two interpreters swelling forth as 
representative of the best and most earnest 
endeavors, from two totally different points of 
view, of human seekers after light. Each has 
taken the whole of knowledge for his province, 
each has spread out before us a connected view 
of man and his environment, and each would 

"... assert Eternal Providence 
And justify the ways of God to men." 

These great teachers typify the catholicity and 
the scientific method that are so characteristic 
of the best expressions of our modern civiliza- 
tion. Whatever of insight we have gained 
into history, into philosophy, into art, and into 
nature, they have incorporated in their syste- 
matic thinking and have endeavored to illumine 
with the light of their controlling principles. 
Hegel, schooled in the teachings of Kant and 



42 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

Fichte, and coming early to an appreciation of 
the seed-thought of Plato and Aristotle, Bruno 
and Spinoza, has taught us in unmistakable 
language that independent, self -active being is 
the father of all things. Spencer, feeling the 
thrill of that unity which makes the cosmos 
one, and receiving from Lamarck and von 
Baer the hint that led him to see that the life 
of the individual furnishes the clew to the 
understanding of the life of the aggregate, 
whether natural or social, has formulated into 
a single and irrefutable law of progress the 
terms of that development, or evolution, which 
has been more or less dimly before the mind of 
man since thought began. The German with 
his principle of self -activity, and the English- 
man with his law of evolution, offer us a foot- 
hold for our knowledge and our faith, and 
assure us that it will safely support them. 
From the one we learn the eternal reasonable- 
ness of all that is or can be, while the other 
teaches us the character of the process by 
which the visible universe, that every day pre- 
sents new wonders to our gaze, has been 
builded out of the primeval star-dust. At 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 43 

their hands the two sublime and awe-inspiring 
verities of Kant — the starry heavens above 
and the moral law within — find their places in 
the life of the spirit, and together testify to its 
eternity and its beauty. 

Despite the fact that our age is one of un- 
exampled scientific and industrial progress, 
yet nothing in all our modern scientific activ- 
ity is more striking than the undisputed 
primacy of thought — thought not in antago- 
nism to sense, but interpretative of the data 
of sense. Idealism, shorn of its crudities 
and its extravagances, and based on reason 
rather than on Berkeley's analysis of sense- 
perception, is conquering the world. What 
Plato saw, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and 
Hegel have demonstrated. The once-dreaded 
materialism has lost all its terrors. Science 
itself has analyzed matter into an aggregate 
of dynamical systems, and speaks of energy 
in terms of will. The seemingly inert stone 
that we grasp in our hand is in reality an 
aggregate of an infinite number of rapidly- 
moving centres of energy. Our own will 
is the only energy of whose direct action we 



44 WHAT imOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WOETH? 

are immediately conscious, and we use our 
experience of it to explain other manifestations 
of energy to ourselves. Modern mathemat- 
ics, that most astounding of intellectual crea- 
tions, has projected the mind's eye through 
infinite time and the mind's hand into bound- 
less space. The very instants of the begin- 
nings of the sun's eclipses are predicted for 
centuries and seons to come. Sirius, so dis- 
tant that the light from its surface, travelling 
at a rate of speed that vies with the light- 
ning, requires more than eight and one-half 
years to reach us, is weighed, and its constitu- 
ents are counted almost as accurately as are 
the bones of our bodies. Yet in 1842 Comte 
declared that it was forever impossible to 
hope to determine the chemical composition 
or the mineralogical structure of the stars. 
An unexpected aberration in the motions of 
Uranus foretold an undiscovered planet at a 
given spot in the sky, and the telescope of 
Galle, turned to that precise point, revealed 
to the astonished senses what was certain to 
thought. But yesterday a discrepancy in the 
weight of nitrogen extracted from the air we 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 45 

breathe, led Lord Rayleigh, by an inexorable 
logic, to the discovery of a new atmospheric 
constituent, argon. The analytical geometry 
of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and 
Leibniz have expanded into the marvellous 
mathematical method — more daring in its 
speculations than anything that the history 
of philosophy records — of Lobachevsky and 
Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, 
mathematics, the indispensable tool of the 
sciences, defying the senses to follow its 
splendid flights, is demonstrating to-day, as 
it has never been demonstrated before, the 
supremacy of the pure reason. The great 
Cayley — who has been given the proud title 
of the Darwin of the English school of 
mathematicians — said a few years ago : ^ "I 
would myself say that the purely imaginary 
objects are the only realities, the ovrco^ ovra, 
in regard to which the corresponding physi- 
cal objects are as the shadows in the cave ; 
and it is only by means of them that we are 
able to deny the existence of a correspond- 

1 Presidential address, British Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science, Southport, 1883. 



46 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

ing physical object; and if there is no con- 
ception of straightness, then it is meaningless 
to deny the conception of a perfectly straight 
line." 

The physicist, also, is coming to see that 
his principle of the conservation of energy in 
its various manifestations is a new and star- 
tling proof of the fundamental philosophical 
principle of self-activity. Energy manifests 
itself as motion, heat, light, electricity, chemi- 
cal action, sound. Each form of its mani- 
festation is transmutable into others. The 
self -active cycle is complete. 

But it is not from the domain of natural 
science alone that illustrations of the all- 
conquering power of thought can be drawn. 
The genius of ChampoUion has called to life 
the thoughts and deeds of Amenotep and 
Rameses ; and what appeared to sense as rude 
decorative sketches on the walls of temple 
and of tomb are seen by the understanding 
to be the recorded history of a great civiliza- 
tion in the valley of the Nile. The inscruta- 
ble Sphinx, that watchdog of the Pyramids, 
" unchangeable in the midst of change," which 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WOETH? 47 

sat facing the coming dawn for centuries 
before the storied siege of Troy, now looks 
down on modern men who write the very 
words of its builders in the language of 
Shakspere and of Milton. The cries of sav- 
age man, the language-symbols of the early 
Aryans, and the multiform and complicated 
tongues of modern Europe, all so seemingly 
diverse to the ear and to the eye, have been 
the foundation for the sure laws of compara- 
tive philology that the labors of Bopp and 
Grimm and Verner have erected upon them. 
All these, and the many triumphs like them, 
are victories of insight ; each marks a new 
stage in the conquering progress of the 
reason, by which it finds itself in every part 
and in every phase of the cosmos and its 
life. 

The insight as to self -activity and the pri- 
macy of reflective thought, I regard as the 
profoundest that philosophy has to offer ; and, 
instead of being urged, as in centuries past, in 
antagonism to the teachings of science, it is 
now becoming the joint conclusion of philoso- 
phy and science together. It is thought that 



48 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

pulsates in the world's grandest poetry and in 
its most exquisite art. It is the very soul of 
the verse of Homer and of Dante, of Shaks- 
pere and of Goethe. It makes the marble 
of Phidias glow with life, and it guides the 
hand of Raphael and Michael Angelo as they 
trace their wondrous figures with the brush. 
It gives immortality to the most beautiful 
of temples, the Parthenon; and it is the inspi- 
ration of that superb mediaeval architecture, 
which bears the name of the conquerors of 
Rome, and which has given to Northern 
Europe its grandest monuments to the reli- 
gious aspiration and devotion of the Middle 
Ages. 

What, then, does this primacy of thought 
signify, and what is its bearing upon our educa- 
tional ideals ? Obviously the possession of a 
conclusion such as this, wrested from nature by 
the hand of science and from history by that of 
philosophy, must serve in many ways to guide 
us in estimating the importance of human insti- 
tutions and of educational instruments. We 
cannot accept either of these, without question, 
from the hands of a tradition to which our 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OE MOST WORTH? 49 

modern philosophy and our modern science were 
wholly unknown; nor can we blindly follow 
those believers in a crude psychology who 
would present us with so many mental facul- 
ties to be trained, each by its appropriate formal 
exercise, as if they were sticks of wood to be 
shaped and reduced to symmetry and order. 
Mental life, as Wundt so forcibly says, " does 
not consist in the connection of unalterable 
objects and varying conditions : in all its 
phases it is process ; an active, not a pas- 
sive, existence ; development, not stagnation." ^ 
Herein is mental life true to nature. Like 
nature, it is not fixed, but ever changing, and 
this unceasing change, necessary to both 
growth and development, gives to life both its 
reality and its pathos. It gives also to edu- 
cation its unending character, and to mankind 
the clew to education's wisest processes. 

The question that I am asking — what 
knowledge is of most worth? — is a very old 
one, and the answers to it which have been 
handed down through the centuries are many 

^ Lectures on human and animal psychology (New York, 
1894), p. 454. 



50 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

and various. It is a question which each age 
must put to itself, and answer from the stand- 
point of its deepest and widest knowledge. 
The wisest philosophers have always seen, 
more or less clearly, the far-reaching character 
of the question and the great importance of 
the answer. Socrates and Plato, Augustine 
and Aquinas, were under no illusions as to it ; 
but often in later years the deeper questions 
relating to the relative worth of subjects of 
study have been either entirely lost sight of 
or very superficially dealt with. Bacon clothes 
in attractive axiomatic form some very crude 
judgments as to the relative worth of studies. 
Rousseau outlines an educational programme 
that ruined his reputation for sobriety of judg- 
ment. Herbert Spencer turns aside for a 
moment from his life-work to apotheosize sci- 
ence in education, although science is, by his 
own definition, only partially unified know- 
ledge. Whewell exalts mathematics in lan- 
guage only less extravagant than that in which 
Sir William Hamilton decries it. In similar 
fashion, others, holding a brief for some par- 
ticular phase or department of knowledge, 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 51 

have come forward crying Eureka ! and pro- 
claiming that the value of all studies must be 
measured in terms of their newly-discovered 
standard. The very latest cry is that studies 
and intellectual exercises are valuable in pro- 
portion as they stimulate enlarged brain-areas, 
thus making the appreciation of Shakspere, of 
Beethoven, and of Leonardo da Vinci solely a 
function of the circulation of the blood. 

But to sciolists of this type philosophy and 
science can now make common answer. If it 
be true that spirit and reason rule the uni- 
verse, then the highest and most enduring 
knowledge is of the things of the spirit. That 
subtle sense of the beautiful and the sublime 
which accompanies spiritual insight, and is 
part of it, — this is the highest achievement 
of which humanity is capable. It is typified, 
in various forms, in the verse of Dante and 
the prose of Thomas a Kempis, in the Sistine 
Madonna of Raphael, and in Mozart's Re- 
quiem. To develop this sense in education 
is the task of art and literature, to interpret 
it is the work of philosophy, and to nourish 
it the function of religion. Because it most 



52 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

fully represents the higher nature of man, it is 
man's highest possession, and those studies 
that directly appeal to it and instruct it are 
beyond compare the most valuable. This has 
been eloquently and beautifully illustrated by 
Brother Azarias. " Take a Raphael or a 
Murillo," he says.^ "We gaze upon the 
painted canvas till its beauty has entered our 
soul. The splendor of the beauty lights up 
within us depths unrevealed, and far down in 
our inner consciousness we discover something 
that responds to the beauty on which we have 
been gazing. It is as though a former friend 
revealed himself to us. There is here a recog- 
nition. The more careful has been our sense- 
culture, the more delicately have our feelings 
been attuned to respond to a thing of beauty 
and find in it a joy forever, all the sooner and 
the more intensely do we experience this recog- 
nition. And therewith comes a vague yearn- 
ing, a longing as for something. What does it 
all mean? The recognition is of the ideal." 
Toward the full recognition and appreciation 

^Phases of thought and criticism (New York, 1892), 
pp. 57, 68. 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 53 

of this insight into the great works of the 
spirit, whether recorded in literature, in art, 
or in institutional life, higher education should 
bend all its energies. The study of philosophy 
itself, or the truly philosophic study of any 
department of knowledge — however remote its 
beginnings may seem to be — will accomplish 
this end. The ways of approach to this goal 
are as many as there are human interests, for 
they are all bound together in the bonds of 
a common origin and a common purpose. The 
attainment of it is true culture, as Matthew 
Arnold has defined it : " the acquainting our- 
selves with the best that has been known and 
said in the world, and thus with the history of 
the human spirit." ^ 

We now come in sight of the element of truth 
and permanence in that Humanism which Pe- 
trarch and Erasmus spread over Europe with 
such high hopes and excellent intentions ; but 
which Sturm, the Strassburg schoolmaster, re- 
duced to the dead, mechanical forms and the 
crude verbalism that bound the schools in fet- 
ters for centuries. Of Humanism itself we 
1 Preface to Literature and dogma (New York, 1889), p. xi. 



54 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

may say, as Pater says of the Renaissance of 
the fifteenth century, that " it was great rather 
by what it designed than by what it achieved. 
Much which it aspired to do, and did but im- 
perfectly or mistakenly, was accomplished in 
what is called the Selaircissement of the eigh- 
teenth century, or in our own generation ; and 
what really belongs to the revival of the fif- 
teenth century is but the leading instinct, the 
curiosity, the initiatory idea."^ 

Many of the representative Humanists were 
broad-minded men whose sympathies were with 
learning of every kind. Erasmus himself writes 
with enthusiasm of other branches of know- 
ledge than literature. "Learning," he says, 
" is springing up all around out of the soil ; 
languages, physics, mathematics, each depart- 
ment thriving. Even theology is showing signs 
of improvement." 2 But unfortunately this 
broad sympathy with every field of knowledge 
was not yet widespread. The wonders and 
splendor of nature that had brought into exist- 

1 Pater, The renaissance (New York, 1888), p. 34. 

2 Eroude, Life and letters of Erasmus (New York, 1894), 
p. 186. 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 55 

ence the earliest religions and the earliest phi- 
losophies were now feared and despised as the 
basis of paganism ; and on wholly false grounds 
a controversy was precipitated as to the relative 
worth of literature and of science that in one 
form or another has continued down to our 
own day. The bitterness with which the con- 
troversy has been carried on, and the extreme 
positions assumed by the partisans of the one 
side or the other, have concealed from view the 
truth that we are now able to perceive clearly 
— the truth that the indwelling reason, by 
whom all things are made, is as truly present, 
though in a different order of manifestation, 
in the world of nature as in the world of spirit. 
One side of this truth was expressed by Schel- 
ling when he taught that nature is the em- 
bryonic life of spirit, and by Froebel when he 
wrote, " The spirit of God rests in nature, lives 
and reigns in nature, is expressed in nature, is 
communicated by nature, is developed and cul- 
tivated in nature." 1 The controversy as to 
the educational value of science, so far, at least, 

1 Education of man, translated by W. N. Hailmann, 
(New York, 1887), p. 154. 



bQ WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

as it concerns educational standards and ideals, 
is, then, an illusory one. It is a mimic war, 
with words alone as weapons, that is fought 
either to expel nature from education or to 
subordinate all else in education to it. We 
should rather say, in the stately verse of 
Milton : 

" Accuse not Nature : she hath, done her part ; 
Do thou but thme." 

And that part is surely to study nature joy- 
fully, earnestly, reverently, as a mighty mani- 
festation of the power and grandeur of the 
same spirit that finds expression in human 
achievement. We must enlarge, then, our 
conception of the humanities, for humanity is 
broader and deeper than we have hitherto sus- 
pected. It touches the universe at many more 
points than one ; and, properly interpreted, 
the study of nature may be classed among the 
humanities as truly as the study of language 
itself. 

This conclusion, which would welcome sci- 
ence with open arms into the school and util- 
ize its opportunities and advantages at every 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 57 

stage of education, does not mean that all 
studies are of equal educational value, or that 
they are mutually and indifferently inter- 
changeable, as are the parts of some machines. 
It means rather that the study of nature is 
entitled to recognition on grounds similar to 
those put forward for the study of literature, 
of art, and of history. But among themselves 
these divisions of knowledge fall into an order 
of excellence as educational material that is 
determined by their respective relations to the 
development of the reflective reason. The 
application of this test must inevitably lead 
us, while honoring science and insisting upon 
its study, to place above it the study of his- 
tory, of literature, of art, and of institutional 
life. But these studies may not for a moment 
be carried on without the study of nature or 
in neglect of it. They are all humanities in 
the truest sense, and it is a false philosophy 
of education that would cut us off from any 
one of them or that would deny the common 
ground on which they rest. In every field of 
knowledge which we are studying is some law 
or phase of energy, and the original as well as 



58 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

the highest energy is will. In the world of 
nature it is exhibited in one series of forms, 
those which produce the results known to 
us as chemical, physical, biological ; in the 
history of mankind, it is manifested in the 
forms of feelings, thoughts, deeds, institutions. 
Because the elements of self-consciousness and 
reflection are present in the latter series and 
absent in the former, it is to these and the 
knowledge of them that we must accord the 
first place in any table of educational values. 
But education, as Mr. Froude has reminded 
us,^ has two aspects. " On one side it is the 
cultivation of man's reason, the development 
of his spiritual nature. It elevates him above 
the pressure of material interests. It makes 
him superior to the pleasures and pains of a 
world which is but his temporary home, in 
filling his mind with higher subjects than the 
occupations of life would themselves provide 
him with." It is this aspect of education that 
I have been considering, for it is from this 
aspect that we derive our inspiration and our 

1 Short studies on great subjects (New York, 1872), II, 
267. 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 59 

ideals. "But," continues Mr. Froude, "a life 
of speculation to the multitude would be a 
life of idleness and uselessness. They have 
to maintain themselves in industrious inde- 
pendence in a world in which it has been 
said there are but three possible modes of 
existence — begging, stealing, and working ; 
and education means also the equipping a 
man with means to earn his own living." It 
is this latter and very practical aspect of edu- 
cation that causes us to feel at times the full 
force of the question of worth in education. 
Immediate utility makes demands upon the 
school which it is unable wholly to neglect. 
If the school is to be the training-ground for 
citizenship, its products must be usefully and 
soundly equipped as well as well disciplined 
and well informed. An educated proletariat 
— to use the forcible paradox of Bismarck — 
is a continual source of disturbance and dan- 
ger to any nation. Acting upon this convic- 
tion, the great modern democracies — and the 
time seems to have come when a democracy 
may be defined as a government, of any form, 
in which public opinion habitually rules — are 



60 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

everywhere having a care that in education 
provision be made for the practical, or immedi- 
ately useful. This is as it should be, but it 
exposes the school to a new series of dangers 
against which it must guard. Utility is a 
term that may be given either a very broad 
or a very narrow meaning. There are utilities 
higher and utilities lower, and under no cir- 
cumstances will the true teacher ever permit 
the former to be sacrificed to the latter. This 
would be done if, in its zeal for fitting the 
child for self-support, the school were to neg- 
lect to lay the foundation for that higher 
intellectual and spiritual life which consti- 
tutes humanity's full stature. This founda- 
tion is made ready only if proper emphasis 
be laid, from the kindergarten to the college, 
on those studies whose subject-matter is the 
direct product of intelligence and will, and 
which can, therefore, make direct appeal to 
man's higher nature. The sciences and their 
applications are capable of use, even from the 
standpoint of this higher order of utilities, 
because of the reason they exhibit and reveal. 
Man's rational freedom is the goal, and the 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 61 

sciences are the lower steps on the ladder 
that reaches to it. 

A splendid confirmation of this view of sci- 
ence is found in the great Belfast address in 
which Professor Tyndall stormed the strong- 
holds of prejudice one and twenty years ago. 
Said Professor Tyndall : ^ 

" Science itself not unf requently derives motive 
power from an ultra-scientific source. Some of its 
greatest discoveries have been made under the 
stimulus of a non-scientific ideal. This was the 
case amongst the ancients, and it has been so 
amongst ourselves. Mayer, Joule, and Colding, 
whose names are associated with the greatest 
of modern generalizations, were thus influenced. 
With his usual insight, Lange at one place re- 
marks that ^it is not always the objectively cor- 
rect and intelligible that helps man most, or leads 
most quickly to the fullest and truest knowledge. 
As the sliding body upon the brachystochrone 
reaches its end sooner than by the straighter road 
of the inclined plane, so through the swing of 
the ideal we often arrive at the naked truth 
more rapidly than by the more direct processes 
of the understanding.' Whewell speaks of en- 

1 Presidential address, British Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science, Belfast, 1874. 



62 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OE MOST WORTH? 

thusiasm of temper as a hindrance to science; 
but lie means the enthusiasm of weak heads. 
There is a strong and resolute enthusiasm in 
which science finds an ally ; and it is to the 
lowering of this fire, rather than to the diminu- 
tion of intellectual insight, that the lessening 
productiveness of men of science in their mature 
years is to be ascribed. Mr. Buckle sought to 
detach intellectual achievement from moral force. 
He gravely erred; for without moral force to 
whip it into action, the achievements of the in- 
tellect would be poor indeed. 

*'It has been said that science divorces itself 
from literature; but the statement, like so many 
others, arises from lack of knowledge. A glance at 
the less technical writings of its leaders — of its 
Helmholtz, its Huxley, and its du Bois-Keymond — 
would show what breadth of literary culture they 
command. Where among modern writers can you 
find their superiors in clearness and vigor of liter- 
ary style ? Science desires not isolation, but freely 
combines with every effort toward the bettering of 
man^s estate. Single-handed, and supported not by 
outward sympathy, but by inward force, it has 
built at least one great wing of the many-man- 
sioned home which man in his totality demands. 
And if rough walls and protruding rafter-ends in- 
dicate that on one side the edifice is still incom- 
plete, it is only by wise combination of the parts 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 63 

required with, those already irrevocably built that 
we can hope for completeness. There is no neces- 
sary incongruity between what has been accom- 
plished and what remains to be done. The moral 
glow of Socrates, which we all feel by ignition, has 
in it nothing incompatible with the physics of 
Anaxagoras which he so much scorned, but which 
he would hardly scorn to-day. . . . 

^' The world embraces not only a Newton, but a 
Shakspere — not only a Boyle, but a Eaphael — not 
only a Kant, but a Beethoven — not only a Darwin, 
but a Carlyle. Not in each of these, but in all, is 
human nature whole. They are not opposed, but 
supplementary — not mutually exclusive, but recon- 
cilable. And if, unsatisfied with, them all, the 
human mind, with the yearning of a pilgrim for his 
distant home, will still turn to the Mystery from 
which it has emerged, seeking so to fashion it as 
to give unity to thought and faith, so long as this 
is done, not only without intolerance or bigotry of 
any kind, but with the enlightened recognition 
that ultimate fixity of conception is here unattain- 
able, and that each, succeeding age must be held 
free to fashion the mystery in accordance with its 
own needs — then, casting aside all the restrictions 
of Materialism, I would affirm this to be a field for 
the noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the 
knowing faculties, may be called the creative facul- 
ties of man." 



64 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

Close as are man's structural relations to the 
lower animals, his equipment is peculiar to 
himself. The actions of the lower animals are 
conditioned by sensations and momentary im- 
pulses. Man, on the other hand, is enabled to 
raise himself above fleeting sensations to the 
realm of ideas, and in that realm he finds his 
real life. Similarly, man's will gradually frees 
itself from bondage to a chain of causes deter- 
mined for it from without, and attains to a 
power of independent self-determination ac- 
cording to durable and continuing ends of 
action. This constitutes character, which, in 
Emerson's fine phrase, is the moral order seen 
through the medium of an individual nature. 
Freedom of the will is not, then, a metaphysical 
notion, nor is it obtained from nature or seen 
in nature. It is a development in the life of 
the human soul. Freedom and rationality are 
two names for the same thing, and their high- 
est development is the end of human life. 
This development is not, as Locke thought, a 
process arising without the mind and acting 
upon it, a passive and pliable recipient. Much 
less is it one that could be induced in the 



WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 65 

hypothetical statue of Condillac and Bonnet. 
It is the very life of the soul itself. 

There is a striking passage in The Mar- 
hie Faun in which Hawthorne suggests the 
idea that the task of the sculptor is not, by 
carving, to impress a figure upon the marble, 
but rather, by the touch of genius, to set free 
the glorious form that the cold grasp of the 
stone imprisons. With similar insight, Brown- 
ing puts these words into the mouth of his 
Paracelsus : 

" Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise 
From outward things, whate'er you may beheve. 
There is an inmost centre in us all, 
Where truth abides in fullness ; and around, 
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
This perfect, clear perception. . . . 

. . . And, to know, 
Rather consists in opening out a way 
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape. 
Than in effecting entry for a light 
Supposed to be without." 

This is the poetical form of the truth that I 
believe is pointed to by both philosophy and 
science. It offers us a sure standing-ground 
for our educational theory. It reveals to us, 



6Q WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 

not as an hypothesis but as a fact, education as 
spiritual growth toward intellectual and moral 
perfection, and saves us from the peril of view- 
ing it as an artificial process according to me- 
chanical formulas. Finally, it assures us that 
while no knowledge is worthless, — for it all 
leads us back to the common cause and ground 
of all, — yet that knowledge is of most worth 
which stands in closest relation to the highest 
forms of the activity of that spirit which is 
created in the image of Him who holds nature 
and man alike in the hollow of his hand. 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 



Presidential Address 

delivered before the 

Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools 

of the Middle States and Maryland, 

at Easton, Pennsylvania, November 29, 1 895 






IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 

The title of this discussion is designedly 
thrown into the form of a question. Its pur- 
pose is to provoke, if possible, a difference of 
opinion — always a healthier and more produc- 
tive intellectual state than the dull mediocrity 
of agreement. Difference of opinion begets 
doubt, doubt begets inquiry, and inquiry event- 
ually leads to truth. Virgil's fine line, 

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, 

is profoundly true ; but more fortunate still is 
he who comes to his knowledge by the sure 
method of honest doubt. 

For a generation we have been doing lip-ser- 
vice to the doctrine of evolution ; but only 
with great slowness and difficulty do old forms 
of speech and old habits of mind fit themselves 
to a new point of view that makes so strong an 
69 



70 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 

appeal both to our reason and to our imagina- 
tion. In no department of knowledge is this 
more true than in the field of education. Edu- 
cation is essentially a conservative process ; it 
cherishes its time-worn instruments and re- 
veres its time-honored standards. The treas- 
ures of the mind are too precious to be lightly 
exposed to the loss or harm that might come to 
them through change. Yet the opinion has 
found lodgment among our craft that after all, 
and despite the excellence of old methods and 
old standards, the educational theory and prac- 
tice of a given age or generation must stand in 
close relation to its intellectual and ethical 
ideals and to the material fabric of its civiliza- 
tion : and surely all three of these habitually 
vary, not only over long periods but in rela- 
tively short intervals of time. It is a grave 
matter for the teacher if virtue is identical with 
knowledge, as Socrates taught ; or if it is the 
result of habit, as Aristotle held ; or if it is the 
cunning invention of rulers, as Mandeville sug- 
gested ; or if it is mere skill in calculating the 
chances of pleasure and pain, as Bentham laid 
down. It is important, too, primarily for the 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 71 

higher education, but eventually for the lower 
schools as well, if our intellectual ideal is repre- 
sented by the active mind of a Leibniz or a 
Gladstone, with its immense energy and broad 
range of interests ; or if it is better typified by 
the narrow, plodding specialization of a Darwin 
or of those Teutonic philologers who are un- 
duly distracted if their investigations cover 
more than the gerund or the dative case. Still 
more directly must our education depend upon 
the material equipment of the time. In this 
day of innumerable printing-presses, with a 
power of production sadly out of proportion to 
their power of discrimination, it is quite incon- 
ceivable that we should not find ourselves 
forced to con anew the grounds on which rest 
the principles and methods that have come 
down to us from the age of manuscripts and 
pack-saddles. Such a process of questioning 
has been under way for some time past, and 
has contributed in no small degree to that 
marvellous enthusiasm for education and to 
that belief in it, the evidences of which are to 
be seen on every hand. 

There are three avenues of scientific ap- 



72 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 

proach to the study of education, and in each 
of them the evolutionary point of view is not 
only illuminating but controlling. These three 
avenues are the physiological, the psychologi- 
cal, and the sociological. Their points of con- 
tact are many and their inter-relations are 
close. Modern psychology has already given 
up the attempt to treat mental life without 
reference to its physical basis ; and it will 
sooner or later regard any interpretation as 
incomplete that does not relate the individual 
to what may be called the social life or con- 
sciousness. Man's institutional life is as much a 
part of his real self as his physical existence or his 
mental constitution. Robinson Orusoe is, in one 
of the catch phrases of the day, a barren ideality. 
It must be admitted that this point of view 
is both very old and very new. It is very old, 
for it was Aristotle himself who wrote, " Man 
is by nature a political animal. And he who 
by nature, and not by mere accident, is without 
a state, is either above humanity or below it."^ 
It is also very new, for it is in flat contradic- 

^ The politics of Aristotle, I, 2, Jowett's translation (Ox- 
ford, 1885), p. 4. 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 73 

tion to the doctrine of Rousseau, " Compelled 
to oppose nature or our social institutions, we 
must choose between making a man and a 
citizen, for we cannot make both at once " ^ — 
the crudeness and superficiality of which have 
not prevented it from exercising a wide and 
long-continued influence. Modern philosophy 
confirms here, as so often, the analysis of Aris- 
totle ; and it rejects, as is becoming customary, 
the extreme individualism of the later eigh- 
teenth century. The significance of this for 
our educational theory is all-important. 

Returning now to the first of the three 
pillars on which the modern study of education 
rests — the physiological — it may be useful to 
recall briefly what consideration has been given 
to it in the past. All of the older culture- 
nations laid stress upon it, and some of them 
dealt with it in systematic fashion. But the 
Greeks alone understood the educational value 
of play. Their great national games combined 
systematic physical training and play in a way 
that we have not yet succeeded in equalling. 

1 Rousseau's ^mile, translated by W. H. Payne (New 
York, 1893), p. 5. 



74 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 

The ascetic ideal that ruled the schools of the 
Middle Ages left no place for a continuance of 
the Greek practice, and it was forgotten. We 
find ourselves to-day struggling to imitate it. 
In Germany systematic physical training is 
made much of in education, but genuine play 
is not prominent. In England, on the contrary, 
play has been found so successful in developing 
strength and suppleness of body and sturdy, 
independent character that anything approach- 
ing systematic, formal training is regarded as 
almost unnecessary. In this country the pres- 
ent tendency is to develop both elements, after 
the fashion of the Greeks ; and it is to be hoped 
that the outcome will be even more satisfactory 
than it was at Athens and at Corinth. 

But physical and physiological considera- 
tions cut far deeper than this. They demand 
a hearing when we have under discussion 
questions of school hours and recesses, of pro- 
grammes and tasks, of school furniture, of text- 
books and blackboards, of light, heat, and fresh 
air. On all of these topics we have recently 
learned much that has not yet found its way 
into our practice. College faculties and school 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 75 

teachers, framers of examination tests, donors 
of laboratories and dormitories, and, most of all, 
architects, are as a rule oblivious to the vital 
interest that the pupil has in matters of this 
kind. Considerations of tradition, conven- 
ience, cost, and external appearance are al- 
lowed full swing, and the growing youth must 
fit the Procrustean bed as best they can. The 
signs of mal-nutrition and weakness, as de- 
scribed, for example, by Warner, and the laws 
of mental and physical fatigue, as arrived at 
by such investigations as those of Mosso and 
of Burgerstein, are about as familiar to teach- 
ers in colleges and in preparatory schools as are 
the Laws of Manu. And yet they affect vi- 
tally every young man or young woman who 
enters a schoolroom or a college. No amount 
of thundering eloquence on the value of the 
ancient classics, no emphasis on character as 
the sole end of education, can make amends 
for our failure to study the facts dealing with 
the physical and physiological elements in edu- 
cation, and for our delay in applying them. 
We need to be strongly reminded that wicked- 
ness is closely akin to weakness, and then to 



76 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 

consider the moral consequences of our physio- 
logical ignorance.^ 

The relation of psychology to education is 
the one subject on which the teacher of to-day 
is supposed to be informed. Normal schools 
without number, and here and there a college, 
give definite instruction in the subject. Yet 
a careful inspection of the most popular text- 
books in use, and visits to some hundreds of 
classrooms, have convinced me that the results 
of this knowledge, if it exists, are, in the field 
of secondary and higher education, almost nil. 
In this respect the elementary teacher is far 
in advance. Perhaps no secondary school or 
college in America can show teaching to com- 
pare, in mastery of scientific method and in 
technical skill, with the best teaching to be 
seen in many of the public elementary schools, 
particularly in the Western States. In con- 
sequence of this, we may safely assume that 
pupils fresh from the vigorous intellectual and 
moral growth of a well-conducted elementary 
school, will turn aside from the machine meth- 

1 Compare "Moral education and will -training," by G. 
Stanley Hall, in Pedagogical Seminary, II, 72-89. 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 77 

ods and dull, uninspiring class-exercises of our 
average academy with disgust. The new edu- 
cational life-blood is flowing most freely and 
vigorously in the veins of the elementary 
teacher. Here and there a secondary school- 
master, and here and there a college president 
or professor, takes a genuine and intelligent 
interest in education for its own sake; but 
the vast majority know nothing of it and are 
but little affected by it. They are content to 
accumulate what they are pleased to term " ex- 
perience"; but their relation to education is 
just that of the motorman on a trolley-car to 
the science of electricity. They use it ; but 
of its nature, principles, and processes they 
are profoundly ignorant. The one qualifica- 
tion most to be feared in a teacher, and the 
one to be most carefully inquired into, is this 
same "experience" when it stands alone. I 
am profoundly distrustful of it. The pure 
empiricist never can have any genuine experi- 
ence, any more than an animal, because he is 
unable to interrogate the phenomena that pre- 
sent themselves to him, and hence is unable to 
understand them. The scientific teacher, the 



78 IS THEKE A NEW EDUCATION? 

theorist, on the contrary, asks what manner 
of phenomena these are that are before him, 
what are their inner relations, and the princi- 
ples on which they are based. This, of course, 
is the first great step, taken by all scientific 
method, toward a knowledge of causes. It is 
at this point that we reach the real reason 
for the need of an accurate knowledge of 
psychology on the part of the teacher. His 
dealings in the schoolroom are primarily with 
mental processes and mental growth. Unless 
these are scientifically studied and understood, 
or — -and this does not happen often — unless 
natural psychological insight comes to the res- 
cue of psychological ignorance, the teaching 
is bound to be mechanical ; and the longer it 
is continued, the more " experience " is ac- 
quired, and the more wooden and mechanical 
it becomes. 

A short time ago I was present at an exer- 
cise in modern history, given to an undergrad- 
uate class, averaging over eighteen years of 
age, in one of our Eastern colleges. The 
text-book in the hands of the students was 
of a very elementary character, and is much 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 79 

used in public high schools, both East and 
West. The teacher was a college graduate, 
and had held his position for several years. 
These years had been years of "experience," 
and would have been strongly urged as an 
important qualification had his name been 
under consideration for promotion or for trans- 
fer to another institution. Yet the entire 
hour that I spent in his class was given up 
to the dictation of an abstract of the text- 
book. This, he told me, was his usual method. 
The students took down the dictation, word 
for word, in a dull, listless way, and gave a 
sigh of mingled despair and relief when it 
came to an end. This process went on sev- 
eral times weekly for either one or two years. 
I ascertained from the instructor that he called 
it "hammering the facts home." He is, for 
aught I know, "hammering" yet, and now has 
some additional " experience " to his credit. So 
have his pupils. 

Not long ago a prominent publishing firm 
issued a widely advertised text-book on a 
subject much taught nowadays. For the pur- 
poses of real teaching, of arousing interest and 



80 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 

enthusiasm in the subject, and of stimulating 
the student to pursue it farther, to reflect upon 
it, and to make its lessons his own, it was as 
ill-adapted as any printed matter occupying 
the same number of pages could be. As a 
compendium of bare facts and dates to be 
committed to memory, and reproduced in an- 
swer to definite questions, it was clear and 
concise. Despite this fact, the publishers have 
recently issued a circular commendatory of 
the book, that contains two-score cordial in- 
dorsements of it as a text-book, over the sig- 
natures of as many high-school and college 
teachers. I interpret that to mean that those 
two-score teachers lack either educational intel- 
ligence or educational conscience ; perhaps both. 
No amount of psychological learning could 
make it impossible for the inquirer to find 
cases like these, and the hundreds of others 
of which they are typical, in the schools and 
colleges ; but a psychological training on the 
part of the teacher would go far to diminish 
their number. Professor Royce pointed out ^ 

1 " Is there a science of education ? " in Educational Be- 
view, I, 15-25 ; 121-132. 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 81 

several years ago that what the teacher has 
chiefly to gain from the study of psychology 
is, not rules of procedure, but the psychologi- 
cal spirit. The teacher, he adds, should be a 
naturalist and cultivate the habit of observing 
the mental life of his pupils for its own sake. 
In this he will follow the method common to 
all naturalists : " What is here in this live 
thing ? Why does it move thus ? What is it 
doing ? What feelings does it appear to have ? 
What type of rudimentary intelligence is it 
showing ? " Such questions as these form the 
habit of watching minds, and of watching 
them closely. This habit is the surest road 
to good teaching, and its formation is the 
best service that psychology can render to 
the classroom. Until a teacher has acquired 
that habit and subordinated his schoolroom 
procedure to it, he is not teaching at all ; 
at best he is either lecturing or hearing 
recitations. 

We are chiefly indebted to the students and 
followers of Herbart for the present wide- 
spread interest in this country in two psycho- 
logical doctrines of the greatest importance 



82 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 

for all teaching — the doctrine of appercep- 
tion and the doctrine of interest. The former 
has to do with mental assimilation, the latter 
with the building of character and ideals. I 
know of no more fruitful field for the appli- 
cation of both of these than the freshman 
year of the college course. My observation 
has taught me that the work of the freshman 
class in college is, as a rule, very ineffective. 
College teachers who admit this fact are in 
the habit of accounting for it by alleging the 
difficulty of welding into a homogeneous mass 
the new students of different advantages, 
training, and mental habits. The task is 
more than difficult ; it is impossible, and 
ought never to be attempted, much less en- 
couraged. That it goes on year after year 
in a hundred colleges is due to the strait- 
jacket system of class teaching by which we 
defy the rules of God and man to the glory 
of what, in our professional cant, we call 
" sound education." If we could secure a 
hearing for the doctrine of apperception, all 
this would be changed. We should then recog- 
nize in our practice as we do in our faith 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 83 

that the mind is not a passive recipient of 
the impressions that reach it ; that it reacts 
upon them, colors them, and makes them a 
part of itself in accordance with the ten- 
dency, the point of view, and the possessions 
that it already has. This tendency, this point 
of view, and these possessions differ in the 
case of every individual. Instead of over- 
looking or seeking to annul these differences, 
we should first understand them and then 
base our teaching upon them. If the first 
month of freshman year were spent in care- 
fully ascertaining the stage of development, 
in power and acquirement, that each pupil 
had reached, it would be possible so to order 
and adjust the work of the year as to make 
it useful and educative. I have known case 
after case in which the opposite policy of 
treating all upon one plane, and making the 
same demands upon all, has made a college 
course a source of positive harm ; it also 
accounts, in greater measure than we are 
aware of, for the large proportion of students 
who fall away at the end of the freshman 
and sophomore years. Yet so long as college 



84 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? ' 

teachers know so little psychology as to cling 
to the old dogma of formal discipline, and 
continue to pound away on so much mathe- 
matics to train the reasoning powers and so 
much Greek grammar to train something else, 
regardless of the content of the instruction 
and of all other considerations — just so long 
will one mind be lost or injured for every 
one that is saved or benefited. As Colonel 
Parker has so forcibly said, "We dwell on 
those who have been saved by our older 
methods, but who has counted the lost ? " 

The situation is not very different with re- 
spect to the doctrine of interest. We con- 
tinually complain that valuable and necessary 
instruction given in school and in college is for- 
gotten, that it is not retained, not extended, and 
not applied. The fault lies partly, no doubt, 
with the pupils, but largely with ourselves. 
We have still to learn what interest means, 
how it is changed from indirect to direct, and 
how it is built up into a permanent element 
of character. We are inexperienced in seeking 
out and seizing upon the present and tempo- 
rary interests of the student, and in using 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 85 

them as a factor in training. It is a com- 
mon thing to hear it said that since life is 
full of obstacles and character is strength- 
ened by overcoming them, so the school and 
college course should not hesitate to compel 
students to do distasteful and difficult things 
simply because they are distasteful and diffi- 
cult. I do not hesitate to say that I believe 
that doctrine to be profoundly immoral and 
its consequences calamitous. But, it is an- 
swered, you certainly would not trust to a 
student's whims and allow him to do or not 
do as he pleases. Certainly not ; and that is 
not the alternative. The proper and scien- 
tific course is to search for the pupil's em- 
pirical and natural interests, and to build 
upon them. This is not always easy; it re- 
quires knowledge, patience, and skill. It is 
far easier to treat the entire class alike and 
to drive them over the hurdles set by a sin- 
gle required course of study, in the vain 
hope that the weak and timid will not be 
injured as much as the strong and confident 
will be benefited, and that somehow or other 
the algebraic sum of the results of the process 



86 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 

will bear a positive sign. I earnestly com- 
mend to every teacher the study of these 
two principles, apperception and interest. I 
do so in the firm belief that the practical 
result of that study would be an immense 
uplifting of the teaching efficiency of every 
educational institution in the United States. 
What, for lack of a better term, I call the 
sociological aspect of education is, in many 
respects, the most important of all. Under 
this head are to be put such questions as those 
that deal with the aim and limits of education, 
its relation to the state, its organization and 
administration, and the course of study to be 
pursued. I can now refer to but a single one of 
these topics. Dr. Harris, in the opening para- 
graphs of his well-known report on the correla- 
tion of studies, dealt a final blow to the idea 
that the course of study is to be settled either 
by tradition or by conditions wholly psycho- 
logical. " The game of chess," he points out,^ 
" would furnish a good course of study for the 
discipline of the powers of attention and calcu- 

1 Beport of the Committee of Fifteen on elementary edu- 
cation (New York, 1895), p. 42. 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 87 

lation of abstract combinations, but it would 
give its possessor little or no knowledge of 
man or nature. . . . Psychology of both 
kinds, physiological and introspective, can hold 
only a subordinate place in the settlement of 
questions relating to the correlation of stud- 
ies." He also shows that the chief considera- 
tion to which all others are to be subordinated 
is the "requirement of the civilization into 
which the child is born, as determining not 
only what he shall study in school, but what 
habits and customs he shall be taught in the 
family before the school age arrives ; as well as 
that he shall acquire a skilled acquaintance with 
some one of a definite series of trades, profes- 
sions, or vocations in the years that follow 
school ; and, furthermore, that this question of 
the relation of the pupil to his civilization de- 
termines what political duties he shall assume 
and what religious faith or spiritual aspirations 
shall be adopted for the conduct of his life."^ 

It is at this point that the study of education 
from the sociological point of view begins. 

1 Beport of the Committee of Fifteen on elementary edu- 
cation (New York, 1895), p. 41. 



88 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 

Instead of forcing the course of study to suit 
the necessities of some preconceived system 
of educational organization, it should deter- 
mine and control that organization absolutely. 
Were this done, the troubles of the secondary 
school, the Cinderella of our educational system, 
would disappear. Just at present it is jammed 
into the space left between the elementary 
school and the college, without any rational and 
ordered relation to either. The ever-present 
problem of college entrance is purely artificial, 
and has no business to exist at all. We have 
ingeniously created it, and are much less in- 
geniously trying to solve it. Leibniz might 
have said that mental development, as well as 
nature, never makes leaps. It is constant and 
continuous. The idea that there is a great gulf 
fixed between the sixteenth and seventeenth 
years, or between the seventeenth and eigh- 
teenth, that nothing but a college entrance ex- 
amination can bridge, is a mere superstition that 
not even age can make respectable. It ought to 
be as easy and natural for the student to pass 
from the secondary school to the college as it is 
for him to pass from one class to another in the 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 89 

school or in the college. In like fashion, the 
work and methods of the one ought to lead 
easily and gradually to those of the other. That 
they do not do so in the educational systems of 
France and Germany is one of the main defects 
of those systems. The American college as a 
school of broad and liberal education, a place 
where studies are carried on with reference to 
their general and more far-reaching relations, 
is indispensable for the very reason that it per- 
mits and encourages the expansion and devel- 
opment of school work in the widest possible 
way, before the narrow specialization of the 
university is entered upon. Happily, there are 
in the United States no artificial obstacles in- 
terposed between the college and the univer- 
sity. We make it very easy to pass from the 
one to the other ; the custom is to accept any 
college degree for just what it means. We 
make it equally easy to pass from one grade or 
class to another and from elementary school to 
secondary school, the presumption always being 
that the pupils are ready and competent to go 
forward. The barrier between secondary school 
and college is the only one that we insist upon 



90 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 

retaining. The intending collegian alone is 
required to run the gantlet of college pro- 
fessors and tutors, who, in utter ignorance of 
his character, training, and acquirements, 
bruise him for hours with such knotty ques- 
tions as their fancy may suggest. In the 
interest of an increased college attendance, not 
to mention that of a sounder educational 
theory, this practice ought to be stopped and 
the formal tests at entrance reduced to a 
minimum. 

Public opinion itself, despite the protests of 
the pundits of the faculties, is forcing an ex- 
tension of the course of study. It is one of 
the best bits of grim humor that our American 
practice, inherited from the mother country, 
affords, that the designation "liberal" has 
come to be claimed as the sole prerogative of a 
very narrow and technical course of study that 
was invented for a very narrow and technical 
purpose, and that has been very imperfectly 
liberalized in the intervening centuries. It 
ought to soften somewhat the asperity of 
teachers of Greek to remember that the very 
arguments by which they are in the habit of 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 91 

resisting the inroads of the modern languages, 
the natural sciences, and economics, were used 
not so many hundreds of years ago to keep 
Greek itself from edging its way into the cur- 
riculum at all. Paulsen is indubitably right in 
his insistence upon the fact that the modern 
world has developed a culture of its own, 
which, while an outgrowth of the culture of 
antiquity, is quite distinct from it. It is to 
this modern culture that our education must 
lead. The first question to be asked of any 
course of study is. Does it lead to a knowledge 
of our contemporary civilization ? If not, it is 
neither efficient nor liberal. 

In society as it exists to-day the dominant 
note, running through all of our struggles and 
problems, is economic, — what the old Greeks 
might have called political. Yet it is a con- 
stant fight to get any proper teaching from the 
economic and social point of view put before 
high-school and college students. They are 
considered too young or too immature to study 
such recondite subjects, although the nice dis- 
tinctions between the Greek moods and tenses 
and the principles of conic sections, with their 



92 IS THEEE A NEW EDUCATION? 

appeal to the highly trained mathematical 
imagination, are their daily food. As a result, 
thousands of young men and young women, 
who have neither the time, the money, nor the 
desire for a university career, are sent forth 
from the schools either in profound ignorance 
of the economic basis of modern society, or 
with only the most superficial and misleading 
knowledge of it. The indefensibleness of this 
policy, even from the most practical point of 
view, is apparent when we bear in mind that in 
this country we are in the habit of submitting 
questions, primarily economic in character, 
every two or four years to the judgment and 
votes of what is substantially an untutored 
mob. If practical politics only dealt with 
chemistry as well as with economics, we could, 
by the same short and easy method, come to 
some definite and authoritative conclusion con- 
cerning the atomic theory and learn the real 
facts regarding helium. But since the eco- 
nomic facts, and not the chemical or linguistic 
facts, are the ones to be bound up most closely 
with our public and private life, they should, 
on that very account, be strongly represented 



IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 93 

in every curriculum. We can leave questions 
as to the undulatory theory of light and as to 
Grimm's and Verner's laws to the specialists ; 
but we may not do the same thing with ques- 
tions as to production and exchange, as to 
monetary policy and taxation. The course 
of study is not liberal, in this century, that 
does not recognize these facts and empha- 
size economics as it deserves. I cite but this 
one instance of conflict between the inherited 
and the scientifically constructed course of 
study. The argument and its illustration 
might be much extended. 

I have now indicated how I should answer 
my own question, and have briefly pointed out 
typical grounds on which that answer rests. 
There remains the ungracious duty of adding 
a word regarding the attitude of college facul- 
ties and schoolmasters toward the scientific 
study of education. The recklessness with 
which the man of letters, sometimes the college 
president, and now and then even the more 
canny college professor, will rush into the 
public discussion of matters of education con- 
cerning which he has no knowledge whatever, 



94 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 

and to which he has never given a half 
hour's connected thought, is appalling. Opin- 
ion serves for information, and prejudice 
usurps the place of principle. The popular 
journals and the printed proceedings of educa- 
tional associations teem with perfectly prepos- 
terous contributions bearing the signatures of 
worthy and distinguished men, who would not 
dream of writing dogmatically upon a physical, 
a biological, or a linguistic problem. For some 
recondite reason they face the equally difficult 
and unfamiliar problems of education without 
a tremor. The effect is bad enough on the 
colleges and schools themselves, but it is far 
worse on the public generally, who are thus 
led off to the worship of false gods. Even in 
the largest American institutions, where most 
is at stake, the men who give any conscientious 
and prolonged study to education itself, as 
distinct from the department of knowledge in 
which their direct work lies, can be counted 
upon the fingers of one hand. As a conse- 
quence, many college faculties are no better 
qualified to decree courses of study and condi- 
tions of admission than they are to adopt a 



IS THEKE A NEW EDUCATION? 95 

system of ventilation or of electric lighting. 
In time, doubtless, this will be recognized, and 
in the former case, as in the latter, the faculties 
will submit to be guided by specialists who do 
know. That will never come to pass, however, 
until school and college teachers see clearly 
that scholarship is one thing and knowledge 
of the educational process quite another ; that 
long service in a school or college is almost 
as compatible with ignorance of education, 
scientifically considered, as long residence in 
a dwelling is compatible with ignorance of ar- 
chitecture and carpentry. 

Dr. Johnson's acumen was equal to drawing 
a distinction between the new as the hitherto 
non-existent, the new as the comparatively re- 
cent, and the new as the hitherto unfamiliar. 
In each and all of these senses of the word, I 
am confident that there is a new education. 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 



An Address 

delivered before the 

National Educational Association 

at Buffalo, New York, July 7, 1896 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

Philosophers, poets, and sometimes men of 
science, are fond of speculating on an answer 
to the question. Whither are we tending? But 
more personal matters and more immediate in- 
terests detain the attention of the vast majority 
of mankind. The mere question of absolute 
physical direction, to say nothing of the ten- 
dencies of institutions and ideals, lies far be- 
yond the range of vision of the average man. 
The passenger in a railway train moving west 
may walk leisurely eastward, within the limits 
of the train, and feel certain of his direction 
and speed. But the train travelling westward, 
forty miles an hour, is on the surface of a 
planet that revolves on its axis from west to 
east with a velocity of a thousand miles an 
hour. More than this, the earth is also plung- 
ing forward in space, in its orbit about the 
99 



100 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

sun, at the fearful rate of more thfin 1100 
miles per minute ; while as a member of the 
solar system it drifts rapidly with its fellows 
toward a distant point in the constellation 
Hercules. Perhaps the whole sidereal system, 
the entire cosmos even, has yet other motions 
of its own. How hopeless, then, is it to at- 
tempt to trace the exact path, judged by an 
absolute standard, of a body moving on the 
earth's surface ! The very conception staggers 
us, and our imaginations fall back helpless. 

Nor is it otherwise with the directions and 
tendencies of things intellectual and institu- 
tional. The Laudator temporis acti is con- 
vinced that civilization is just now on a down- 
ward grade. The old order has changed and 
given place to a new ; and the new order seems 
to him to lack something of the robustness, 
the idealism, the valor, of the old. His an- 
tagonist, fresh from contemplating the abstract 
rights of man as depicted by modern political 
philosophers, sees hope and promise only in 
the future ; to such an observer the past is a 
record of folly, imperfection, and crime. The 
sane man may be forgiven if at times he fails 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 101 

to listen with patience to either advocate. His 
sanity deserts him, however, if he attempts to 
take refuge in cynicism and pessimism. While 
we may not hope to grasp fully the significance 
of movements of which we ourselves are a part, 
we can nevertheless study them, trace their 
beginnings, and measure their present effects. 
Such an attitude, hopeful yet cautious, leads 
to the only point of view which is at once 
scientific and philosophical. 

However difficult it may be to estimate pres- 
ent tendencies with any precision or authority, 
there is a widespread instinctive feeling among 
thoughtful men, as Mr. Kidd has pointed out 
in the first pages of his Social Evolution, that 
a definite stage in the evolution of our civiliza- 
tion is drawing to a close and that we are face 
to face with a new era. The history of the 
nineteenth century lends color to the sugges- 
tion that the new era has already begun. The 
evidence for this is drawn from the records of 
material advance, of scientific progress, and of 
political development. /^ 

S • The material advances made since the pres- 
ent century opened are more numerous and 



102 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

more striking than the sum total of those that 
all previous history records. We find it diffi- 
cult even to imagine the world of our grand- 
fathers, and almost impossible to appreciate 
or understand it. Without the factory, with- 
out the manifold products and applications of 
steam and electricity, without even the news- 
paper and the sulphur match, the details of 
our daily life would be strangely different. 
In our time wholly new mechanical and eco- 
nomic forces are actively at work, and have 
already changed the appearance of the earth's 
surface. What another hundred years may 
bring forth no one dares to predict. / ^ 
^ The scientific progress of the century is no 
less marvellous and no less revolutionary in its 
effects than the material advance. The neb- 
ular hypothesis, once the speculative dream 
of a few mathematicians and philosophers, is 
now a scientific commonplace. The geology 
gf Lyell, the astronomy of Herschel, the biol- 
ogy of von Baer, of Darwin, and of Huxley, 
the physiology of Mliller, the physics of Helm- 
holtz and of Roentgen, are already part of the 
common knowledge of all educated men. To 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 103 

US the world and its constitution present an 
appearance very different from that which was 
familiar to our ancestors. 

But most striking and impressive of all move- 
ments of the century is the political develop- 
ment toward the form of government known 
as democracy. Steadily and doggedly through- 
out the ten decades the movement toward de- 
mocracy has gone its conquering way. When 
the century opened democracy was a chimera. 
It had been attempted in Greece and Rome 
and again in the Middle Ages ; and the reflect- 
ing portion of mankind believed it to be a 
failure. Whatever its possibilities in a small 
and homogeneous community, it was felt to 
be wholly inapplicable to large states. The 
contention that government could be carried 
on by what Mill called collective mediocrity '^ 
rather than by the intelligent few, was felt 
to be preposterous. The horrible spectre 
of the French Revolution was fresh in the 
minds of men. The United States, hardly 
risen from their cradle, were regarded by the 
statesmen of Europe with a curiosity, partly 
amused, partly disdainful. Germany was gov- 



104 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

erned by an absolute monarch, the grand- 
nephew of the great Frederick himself. In 
England a constitutional oligarchy, with Pitt 
at its head, was firmly intrenched in power. 
The Napoleonic reaction was in full swing in 
France. How different will be the spectacle 
when the twentieth century opens ! In Great 
Britain one far-reaching reform after another 
has left standing only the shell of oligarchy; 
the spirit and support of British civilization 
are democratic. Despite the influence of Bis- 
marck and the two Williams, great progress 
is being made toward the democratization of 
Germany. France, after a period of unex- 
ampled trouble and unrest, has founded a suc- 
cessful and apparently stable republic. The 
United States have disappointed every foe and 
falsified the predictions of every hostile critic. 
The governmental framework constructed by 
the fathers for less than four millions of people, 
scattered along a narrow strip of seaboard, has 
expanded easily to meet the needs of a diverse 
population twenty times as large, gathered into 
great cities and distributed over an empire of 
seacoast, mountain, plain, and forest. It has 



DEMOCEACY AND EDUCATION 105 

withstood the shock of the greatest civil war 
of all time, fought by men of high intelligence 
and determined convictions. It has permitted 
the development and expansion of a civili- 
zation in which there is equality of oppor- 
tunity for all, and where the highest civil and 
military honors have been thrust upon the 
children of the plain people by their grateful 
fellow-citizens. 

So significant has this phenomenon of de- 
mocracy become, so widespread is its influence, 
and so dominating are its ideals, that we have 
rightly begun to study it both with the im- 
partial eye of the historian and by the ana- 
lytic method of the scientist. The literature 
of democracy for the past half century is ex- 
tremely important ; and Tocqueville, Bage- 
hot, Scherer, Carlyle, Maine, Bryce, and Lecky 
are but a few of the great names that have 
, contributed to it. Through all the pages of \ 
i these writers runs an expression of the con- ^- 
I viction that the stream of tendency toward 
I democracy can neither be turned back nor 
I permanently checked. Some of these students 
\ of democracy are its enthusiastic advocates, 



, 



106 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

others are its hostile critics : all alike seem 
to resign themselves to it. 

The process of substituting this new social 
and political system for an older one has not 
been uninterrupted or untroubled, nor has it 
given perfect satisfaction. As the political 
pendulum has continued to swing through a 
wide but diminishing arc, the cries have 
been loud and constant that injustice and 
favoritism have not been suppressed, that all 
are not equally prosperous, and that not even 
democracy is a cure for all our distress and 
dissatisfaction. Much of this is no doubt due 
to the tendency in all stages of history, spoken 
of by Burke, to ascribe to prevailing forms 
of government ills that in reality flow from 
the constitution of human nature. But in 
part at least — in how great part perhaps we 
fail to recognize — it is due to the imperfect 
and halting application of our democratic ideals 
and the very partial acceptance of our dem- 
ocratic responsibilities. The platitudes of 
democracy are readily accepted by the crowd ; 
the full depth of its principles is far from being 
generally understood. It is easy to cry " Lib- 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 107 

erty, Equality, and Fraternity," and to carve 
the words in letters of stone upon public 
buildings and public monuments. It is not 
so easy to answer the query whether, in truth, 
unrestricted liberty and perfect equality are 
at all compatible. For it has been pointed 
out that liberty leads directly to inequality, 
based upon the natural differences of capacity 
and application among men. Equality, on 
the other hand, in any economic sense, is at- 
tainable only by the suppression in some 
degree of liberty, in order that, directly or in- 
directly, the strong arm of the state may be 
able to hold back the precocious and to push 
forward the sluggish. Obviously there is food 
for thought in this, — thought that may serve 
to check the rhetorical exuberance of the en- 
thusiast, and lead him to ask whether we yet 
fully grasp what democracy means. 

Democracy is, as I have said, a movement 
so novel and so sweeping, that we have 
not yet had time to compare it closely, in 
all its phases, with monarchy and oligarchy. 
The advantages of those forms of political 
organization were manifest when society was 



108 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

young and man's institutional life yet undevel- 
oped. As time went on, the weaknesses of 
such forms of government became apparent. 
The plunge into democracy was made, and we 
have usually gone no further than to contrast 
its blessings with what we know of the op- 
pression and iniquity that resulted from king- 
ship and oligarchy in the early modern period. 
We must, however, go further than this, and 
gain a truer and deeper insight into the insti- 
tutional life of which we are a part. 
i It is just here that we find evidence of the 
I close relations that exist between democracy 
and education. So long as the direction of 
man's institutional life was in the hands of one 
or the few, the need for a wide di:ffusion of 
political intelligence was not strongly felt. 
The divine right of kings found its correlative 
in the diabolical ignorance of the masses. 
There was no educational ideal, resting upon a 
social and political necessity, that was broad 
enough to include the whole people. But the 
rapid widening of the basis of sovereignty has 
changed all that. No deeper conviction per- 
vades the people of the United States and of 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 109 

France, who are the most aggressive exponents 
of democracy, than that the preservation of 
liberty under the law, and of the institutions 
that are our precious possession and proucj 
heritage, depends upon the intelligence of the 
whole people. It is on this unshakable foun- 
dation that the argument for public education 
at public expense really rests. 

It was not by accident that the Greek philos- 
ophers made their contributions to educational 
theory in treatises on the nature and functions 
of the state. Both Plato and Aristotle had 
a deep insight into the meaning of man's social 
and institutional life. To live together with 
one's fellows in a community involves fitness 
so to live. This fitness, in turn, implies disci- 
pline, instruction, training ; that is, education. 
The highest type of individual life is found in 
community life. Ethics passes into or includes 
politics, and the education of the individual is 
education for the state. The educated Greek 
at the height of his country's development was 
taught to regard participation in the public 
service alike as a duty and a privilege. The 
well-being of the community was constantly 



110 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

before him as an ideal of personal conduct. 
To depart from that point of view is to entail 
the gravest consequences. That a large pro- 
portion of our people, and among their number 
some of the most highly trained, have departed 
from it, needs no proof. 

Failure to understand the political life of a 
democratic state and failure to participate fully 
in it, lead directly to false views of the state 
and its relations to the individual citizen. In- 
stead of being regarded as the sum total of 
the citizens who compose it, the state is, in 
thought at least, then regarded as an artificial 
creation, the plaything of so-called politicians 
and wire-pullers. This view, that the individual 
and the state are somehow independent each of 
the other, is not without support in modern 
political philosophy, but it is a crude and 
superficial view. It gives rise to those fal- 
lacies that regard the state either as a tyrant 
to be resisted or as a benefactor to be courted. 
No democracy can endure permanently on , 
Jeither basis. The state is the completion of ] 
|the life of the individual, and without it he 
Would not wholly live. To inculcate that doc- 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 111 

trine should be an aim of all education in a 
democracy. To live up to it should be the 
ideal of the nation's educated men. 

Impossible in theory as the separation of the 
state from the individuals who compose it 
seems, yet in practice it is found to exist. 
This is true in the United States, and in some 
localities more than others. Our constitutional 
system, elaborately adjusted so that each in- 
dividual's choice may count in the ascertain- 
ment of the common will, now shelters a 
system of party organization and of political 
practice, undreamt of by the fathers, that 
effectually reduces our theoretical democracy 
to an oligarchy, and that oligarchy by no 
means an aristocracy. With here and there an 
exception, the educated men of the country 
hold themselves aloof — or are held aloof — 
from participation in what is called practical 
politics. That field of activity which should 
attract the highest intelligence of the nation 
too often repels it. When a man of the most 
highly trained powers engages in political life, 
he becomes an object of curiosity and comment. 
If he despises the petty arts and chicaneries 



112 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

of the demagogue he becomes "unpopular." 
After a brief interval he passes off the public 
stage without even a perfunctory recognition 
of his services. It is safe to say that the 
framers of no government, least of all the 
framers of our own, contemplated a practical 
outcome such as this. If education and train- 
ing unfit men for political life, then there is 
something wrong either with our political life 
or with our education. 

The teachers of the country should address 
themselves to this question with determination 
and zeal. Instruction in civil government is 
good ; the inculcation of patriotism is good ; 
the flag upon the schoolhouse is good. But all 
these devices lie upon the surface. The real 
question involved is ethical. It reaches deep 
down to the very foundations of morality. It 
is illuminated by history. 

The public education of a great democratic 
people has other aims to fulfil than the exten- 
sion of scientific knowledge or the development 
of literary culture. It must prepare for intel- 
ligent citizenship. More than a century ago 
Burke wrote that " the generality of people are 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 113 

fifty years, at least, behindhand in their poli- 
tics. There are but very few who are capable 
of comparing and digesting what passes before 
their eyes at different times and occasions, so 
as to form the whole into a distinct system." 
This is the warning of one of the greatest of 
publicists that a thoroughly instructed and 
competent public opinion on political matters 
is difficult to attain. Yet, unless we are to 
surrender the very principle on which democ- 
racy rests, we must struggle to attain it. 
Something may be accomplished by precept, 
something by direct instruction, much by 
example. The words " politics " and " politi- 
cian" must be rescued from the low esteem 
into which they have fallen, and restored to 
their ancient and honorable meaning. It is 
safe to say that the framers of our Constitu- 
tion never foresaw that the time would come 
when thousands of intelligent men and women 
would regard " politics " as beneath them, and 
when a cynical unwillingness to participate 
in the choice of persons and policies would 
develop among the people. Yet such is, of 
course, the case. The people of the state of 



114 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

New York will in November next choose a 
governor. The power and dignity of the 
office make it one of the greatest in the land. 
About one and a half million qualified voters 
will be entitled to participate in the choice. 
Theoretically any competent person might be 
put forward for the office, and every indi- 
vidual's preference would be recorded and 
weighed. As a matter of fact, however, the 
choice of the state must be made between two 
persons, who in turn will be selected by, per- 
haps, ten per cent, of the electorate, at the sug- 
gestion or dictation of not more than a dozen 
men. Had such a system, or anything like it, 
been proposed at the time the Constitution was 
adopted, there would have been instant rebel- 
lion. " Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- 
ness" would not have seemed worth having 
under such conditions. Yet, now that it has 
come about, there is no very great dissatisfac- 
tion with it. The system could be broken up 
in a twelvemonth if men really cared to break 
it up. It exists, therefore, by popular consent, 
if not with popular approval. Its objective re- 
sults may be as good as those that would be 



DEMOCEACY AND EDUCATION 



115 



reached by the ideal system ; but its effect on 
the individual is disastrous. It induces a feel- 
ing of irresponsibility for public policy and a 
lack of interest in it that are absolutely de- 
structive of good citizenship. The good citi- 
zen is not the querulous critic of public men 
and public affairs, however intelligent he may 
be ; he is rather the constant participator in 
political struggles, who has well-grounded con- 
victions and a strong determination to influ- 
ence, by all honorable means, the opinion of 
the community. Were it otherwise, universal 
suffrage would not be worth having, and public 
education would be a luxury, not a necessity. 

We do not better ourselves or serve the pub- 
lic interest by berating those who do interest 
themselves continually in politics, when their 
aims and their methods are not to our liking. 
There can be no doubt that the patriotic and 
well-intentioned element in the community is 
stronger and more numerous than the self- 
seeking and evil-dispositioned. It has the 
remedy in its own hands, and it is one of the 
chief duties of our education to enforce this 
truth. 



116 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

Much of the disinclination to engage in 
active political life that is noticeable among a 
portion of our people is due, I believe, to the 
evil effects upon political standards and 
methods that flow from the debasing and 
degrading system that has gained so strong a 
hold in the United States of treating public 
office as a reward for partisan activity. The 
spoils system is absolutely undemocratic and 
utterly unworthy of toleration by an intelli- 
gent people. Suppose that it ruled the schools, 
as it rules so many other departments of public 
administration : then we should expect to see 
the election of a mayor in Boston, Chicago, 
New Orleans, or San Francisco, followed by 
hundreds of changes among the public school 
teachers, made solely for political reasons. 
How long would the National Educational 
Association permit that to go on without a 
protest that would be heard and heeded from 
Maine to Texas ? Yet why should teachers, as 
good citizens, be more tolerant of such an abuse 
in other departments of the government ? We 
have all noted with gratification the progress 
that is making toward the elimination of this 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 117 

evil. A determined band of men have kept 
the issue before the public for nearly a genera- 
tion, and now they have the satisfaction of see- 
ing a great portion of the national service 
wrested from the defiling hand of the spoils 
hunter. In the state of New York the people 
have put into their new constitution an em- 
phatic declaration on the subject. The full 
effect of this declaration, splendidly upheld 
and broadly interpreted by the courts, is just 
beginning to dawn upon the foes of a reformed 
and efficient public service. From this ad- 
vance of sound sentiment and honest policy 
we may take every encouragement. But much 
remains to be done. Public sentiment must be 
first interested, then educated. Efficient pub- 
lic service is a mark of civilization. To turn 
over the care of great public undertakings to 
the self-seeking camp-followers of some politi- 
cal potentate, is barbaric. We teachers are the 
first to insist that incompetent and untrained 
persons shall not be allowed in the service of 
the schools. Why, then, should we tolerate, 
the sight of a house-painter, instead of an 
engineer, supervising the streets and roadways 



118 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

of a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, or 
that of an illiterate hanger-on presiding over 
the public works of a great metropolis ? 
These instances, drawn at random from recent 
political history, are typical of conditions that 
will be found widely diffused throughout our 
public service. Those conditions exist because 
of bad citizenship, low ideals of public service, 
and wretchedly inadequate moral vision. They 
will not be remedied until each one of us 
assumes his share of the task. 

It is instructive, too, to note that the spoils 
system has diverted public interest in great 
measure from choice between policies to a 
choice between men. Two hundred years 
ago men made great sacrifices for an oppor- 
tunity to share in the making of the laws 
by which they were governed. Yet when, in 
1894, the people of the state of New York 
were called upon to vote, at one and the 
same election, for a governor and for or 
against a new constitution, containing many 
important and some novel propositions, more 
than a million and a quarter men voted for 
a candidate for governor, while less than 



DEMOCEACY AND EDUCATION 



119 



three-quarters of a million expressed them- 
selves regarding the proposed constitution. 
And this is by no means a solitary instance 
of the tendency that it illustrates. A rational 
and intelligent democracy will first discuss 
questions of principle and then select agents 
to carry their determinations into effect. To 
fix our interest solely on individuals, and to 
overlook or neglect the principles for which 
they stand, is not intelligent. 

It is a serious error, too, to believe, and 
to spread the belief, that democracies have 
nothing to learn as to principles of govern- 
ment and nothing to improve. From the 
time of Aristotle the dangers that are in- 
herent in democracy have been known and 
discussed. But in our time men are often 
too blinded by the brilliancy of the mani- 
fest successes and advantages of this form 
of government to be able or willing to con- 
sider carefully the other side of the picture. 
How long, for example, could the American 
Congress maintain its power and prestige, 
if its membership was split up into half a 
score of warring groups, as in France? How 



120 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

long will the American Senate continue to 
call forth, the respect and confidence of the 
people, if its childish methods of transacting 
public business and its inability to close its 
own debates are allowed to continue? How 
long would life in our greatest city be en- 
durable, if its administration be turned over 
permanently to the ignorant and rapacious 
members of a society organized for political 
plunder ? What more distressing division 
of our people can there be than one on sec- 
tional lines, such as took place in 1860 and 
such as is being attempted again in 1896? 
Is it possible to believe that our native op- 
timism is all that is needed to extricate us 
from these dangers — dangers not imaginary, 
but terribly real ? 

The difficulties of democracy are the op- 
portunities of education. If our education 
be sound, if it lay due emphasis on indi- 
vidual responsibility for social and political 
progress, if it counteract the anarchistic ten- 
dencies that grow out of selfishness and 
greed, if it promote a patriotism that reaches 
farther than militant jingoism and gunboats, 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 121 

then we may cease to have any doubts as to 
the perpetuity and integrity of our institu- 
tions. But I am profoundly convinced that 
the greatest educational need of our time, 
in higher and lower schools alike, is a fuller 
appreciation on the part of the teachers of 
what human institutions really mean and 
what tremendous moral issues and principles 
they involve. The ethics of individual life 
must be traced to its roots in the ethics of 
the social whole. The family, property, the 
common law, the state, and the church, are 
all involved. These, and their products, 
taken together, constitute civilization and 
mark it off from barbarism. Inheritor of 
a glorious past, each generation is a trustee 
for posterity. To preserve, protect, and 
transmit its inheritance unimpaired, is its 
highest duty. To accomplish this is not 
the task of the few, but the duty of all. 

That democracy alone will be triumphant 
which has both intelligence and character. 
To develop them among the whole people 
is the task of education in a democracy. 
Not, then, by vainglorious boasting, not by 



122 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 

self-satisfied indifference, not by selfish and 
indolent withdrawal from participation in 
the interests and government of the commu- 
nity, but rather by the enthusiasm, born of 
intense conviction, that finds the happiness 
of each in the good of all, will our educa- 
tional ideals be satisfied and our free gov- 
ernment be placed beyond the reach of the 
forces of dissolution and decay. 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND THE 
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY 



An Introduction 

to Paulsen's "German Universities, 

their character and historical development" 

(New York, 1895) 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND THE 
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY 

Nowhere, outside of the German-speaking 
countries themselves, have the German uni- 
versities been so highly appreciated and so 
widely imitated as in the United States. Just 
as the historic American college traces its ori- 
gin in direct line to Oxford and Cambridge 
and their influence, so the new American uni- 
versity represents, to a remarkable degree, the 
influence and authority of the academic tradi- 
tions of Heidelberg and Gottingen, of Leipsic 
and Berlin. 

The distinction between the function of the 
college and that of the university, which be- 
comes clearer day by day to the student of 
education, has thus far proved too subtle to 
reach the understanding and too commonplace 
to satisfy the pride of the American people; 
for the existing terminology inextricably con- 
125 



126 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 

fuses colleges and universities, and sometimes 
even institutions that are little more than sec- 
ondary schools, and it taxes the patience and 
skill of the expert to disentangle them. If 
we cut the Gordian knot by allowing every 
institution founded for any form or phase of 
higher education to classify itself by the name 
that it assumes, then there are no fewer than 
134 universities in the United States.^ Of 
these, 1 are in Illinois (although the new Uni- 
versity of Chicago was not included in the 
enumeration of 1890-91), 8 are in Kansas, 14 
are in Ohio, 9 are in Tennessee (of which total 
the city of Nashville alone, with about 80,000 
inhabitants, contributes 3), 8 are in Texas, and 
4 are in the city of New Orleans. When this 
surprising number is compared with the total 
of 20 universities for the whole German Em- 
pire, it is evident, without further investiga- 
tion, that there is some difference in standard 
between the two countries, and that to be a 
university in fact is something more than to 
be a university in name. 

1 Beport of the Commissioner of Education, 1890-91, pp. 
1398-1413. 



COLLEGE AND UNIVEKSITY 127 

According to another extreme view, there 
are no American universities whatever. Only 
two years ago so distinguished an authority 
as Professor von Hoist, formerly of Freiburg 
but now attached to the University of Chicago, 
said : ^ — 

" There is in the United States as yet not a 
single university in the sense attached to the 
word by Europeans. All the American insti- 
tutions bearing this name are either compounds 
of college and university — the university, as 
an aftergrowth, figuring still to some extent 
as a kind of annex or excrescence of the col- 
lege — or hybrids of college and university, 
or, finally, a torso of a university. An insti- 
tution wholly detached from the school work 
done by colleges, and containing all the four 
faculties organically connected to a Universitas 
literarum, does not exist." 

Inasmuch as there is no common agreement 
among Europeans as to what the term "uni- 
versity" means — as may readily be seen by 
contrasting the University of Oxford with the 
University of France, and either or both with 
1 Educational Beview, V, 113. 



128 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 

the University of Berlin — Professor von Hoist 
obviously meant by European, German; and 
his definition of a university bears out this 
interpretation. With this limitation his judg- 
ment may be accepted as technically correct ; 
but it rests upon two false assumptions : 
(1) that exact reproductions of the German 
universities should be developed in the United 
States, and that until this development takes 
place there will be no American universities; 
and (2) that the American college is to be 
classed with the German gymnasium as a sec- 
ondary school. Into these two blunders those 
observers of American educational organization 
who occupy the exclusively German point of 
view habitually fall ; and in more than one 
instance the truest and most natural develop- 
ment of higher education in America has been 
impeded and retarded by the attempt, on the 
part of those who share Professor von Hoist's 
errors, to force that development into the ex- 
act channels worn by German precedent. 

The American university may, or rather 
must, learn the lessons that its German prede- 
cessor has to teach, but it should be expected 



COLLEGE AND UNIVEESITY 129 

to develop also characteristics peculiar to it- 
self. In order to become great — indeed, in 
order to exist at all, — a university must rep- 
resent the national life and minister to it. 
When the universities of any country cease 
to be in close touch with the social life and 
institutions of the people, and fail to yield 
to the efforts of those who would readjust 
them, their days of influence are numbered. 
The same is true of any system of educational 
organization. For this reason alone, if for 
no other, an educational organization closely 
following the German type would not thrive 
in America; indeed, with all its undisputed 
excellences, the German system would not 
meet our needs so well as the yet unsyste- 
matic, but remarkably effective, organization 
that circumstances have brought into exis- 
tence. Therefore Professor von Hoist is not 
likely at any time to see a single university 
in the United States, if he persists in giving 
to that word its technical German significance. 
But using the word in a broader, and, I be- 
lieve, a truer sense, — the sense that, while 
not confounding it with a college, however 



130 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 

large or however ancient, nor applying it 
mistakenly to a college and a surrounding 
group of technical and professional faculties 
or schools, yet extends the term to include 
any institution where students, adequately 
trained hy previous study of the liberal arts 
and sciences^ are led into special fields of 
learning and research by teachers of high ex- 
cellence and originality; and where, by the 
agency of libraries, museums, laboratories, and 
publications, knowledge is conserved, advanced, 
and disseminated, — in this sense one may per- 
haps count six or eight American universities 
in existence to-day, and half as many more 
in the process of making. 

To confuse the American college with the 
German gymnasium is inexcusable. Neither 
a large college like Princeton, nor a smaller 
one like Williams or Bowdoin, can be imag- 
ined as part of the gymnasial system. The 
American college is, in the phrase of Tacitus, 
tantum sui similis ; neither the English pub- 
lic school, the French lycee, nor the German 
gymnasium, is its counterpart. Its free stu- 
dent-life and broad range of studies liken it 



COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 131 

in some degree to a university ; but the imma- 
turity of its students, the necessarily didactic 
character of most of the work of its instruc- 
tors, and the end that it has in view, mark 
it off as belonging to a different type. The 
college has proved to be well suited to the 
demands of American life and to be a power- 
ful force in American civilization and culture. 
Its usefulness is in no wise impaired nor its 
dignity lessened now that the university, with 
a wholly different aim and a totally different 
set of problems to solve, has grown up by its 
side. As President Hyde, of Bowdoin Col- 
lege, has truly and forcibly said : ^ " For com- 
bining sound scholarship with solid character ; 
for making men both intellectually and spirit- 
ually free ; for uniting the pursuit of truth 
with reverence for duty, the small college 
[and the large as well], open to the worthy 
graduates of every good high school, present- 
ing a course sufficiently rigid to give sym- 
metrical development and sufficiently elastic to 
encourage individuality along congenial lines, 
taught by professors who are men first and 
1 Educational Beview, II, 320, 321. 



132 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 

scholars afterwards, governed by kindly per- 
sonal influence and secluded from too fre- 
quent contact with social distractions, has a 
mission which no change of educational con- 
ditions can take away, and a policy which 
no sentiment of vanity or jealousy should be 
permitted to turn aside." 

In 1891 there was one student enrolled in 
a college of the liberal arts and sciences for 
every 1363 inhabitants of the United States.^ 
Counting five persons to a family ,2 this means 
that one family in every 272.6, the country 
over, contributed to the college population. 
Of course, in some sections of the country 
the ratio was much less. In Massachusetts, 
for example, there was one college student 
for every 858 of population, or one for every 
171.6 families. In Iowa the proportion was 
one to 908 persons, or 181.6 families ; in 
Utah, one to 789 persons, or 157.8 families. 
These statistics, read in relation to the vast 

1 Beport of the Commissioner of Education, 1890-91, 
p. 827. 

2 The actual ratio in the United States in 1890 was 4.93 
(see Abstract of the Eleventh Census, 1890, p. 54). 



COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 133 

extent of the territory of the United States 
and to the heterogeneousness of its popula- 
tion of 70,000,000, are ample proof, if proof 
were needed, that the college is a very famil- 
iar feature in American life, and that it sup- 
plies the educational needs of the people to 
a remarkable degree. 

Of the 481 American colleges, perhaps no 
two have precisely the same course of study 
or the same equipment ; but the common 
features that distinguish them are well known. 
The ancient classics, mathematics, the English 
language and literature, the modern European 
languages, the natural sciences, economics and 
philosophy, are doubtless represented to some 
extent in every college curriculum ; yet every 
phase of educational opinion and every variety 
of local interest are represented in the details 
of their arrangement. But we may be sure 
that wherever it is found, whether on the 
Atlantic seaboard, in some inland town of 
the West or South, or on the Pacific slope, 
the college is a force making for a broader 
intellectual life and a higher type of citizen- 
ship. It leaves to the university the task of 



134 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 

educating specialists, investigators, and sci- 
entifically trained members of the learned 
professions. 

The diversity of the college when contrasted 
with the uniformity of the gymnasium makes 
it plain that the American university does 
not rest upon any uniform and closely con- 
trolled foundation. American students come 
to the university with very varied prepara- 
tion in knowledge and training. But if the 
healthy forces recently set at work in the 
field of American higher education bring 
about their legitimate results, the efficiency 
of the university and its power for good 
will be distinctly increased rather than dimin- 
ished by the fact that its students are not all 
cast in a common mould. The principles of 
the limited election of studies and of the 
adaptation of the curriculum to the pupil, 
rather than the pupil to the curriculum, are 
as sound when applied in the secondary school 
as in the college, and the scope of their appli- 
cation widens year by year. The American 
college graduate who desires a university 
career is thus enabled to enter upon it a 



COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 135 

broadly and liberally educated man, with 
tastes formed and aptitudes developed, ready 
to undertake with immediate advantage the 
specialized work for the sake of which the 
university exists. He is much more widely, 
though perhaps less minutely, trained, than 
the German Ahiturient. 

In one very important respect the American 
system of higher education is distinctly supe- 
rior to the German. In Germany a clear-cut 
dividing line between the gymnasium and the 
university is drawn by the complete and care- 
fully preserved difference in method, in spirit, 
and in ideal that exists between them. The 
contrast between the narrowness of the gym- 
nasium and the generous freedom of the univer- 
sity is very sharp, and many a university student 
loses his balance entirely, or wastes much pre- 
cious time and force, in adjusting himself to his 
totally new surroundings. In America, on the 
contrary, the college and the university some- 
times exist side by side in the same corpora- 
tion, as at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, 
and Chicago, and the work of the one passes 
gradually and insensibly into that of the other. 



136 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 

Even when, as is generally the case, the col- 
lege exists as a thing apart, the later years of 
its course of study are so organized and con- 
ducted as to make the transition from college 
to university easy and natural. This practice 
is sound in psychology, sound in economics, 
and sound in common sense. Its practical suc- 
cess is amply demonstrated by the fact that 
there is no American university — unless that 
name be given to the few partially developed 
departments of study represented at Worcester, 
Mass., — that is not in the closest relation to a 
college which is a member of the same corpora- 
tion. The institutions that to Professor von 
Hoist are "compounds of college and univer- 
sity " are, therefore, not, as he evidently thinks, 
compounds of gymnasium and university, but 
the peculiar product of the American educa- 
tional organization and its peculiar strength. 

But though the foundation on which uni- 
versity work in America rests, differs and will 
continue to differ from that provided in Ger- 
many by a uniform system of state-controlled 
gymnasiums, the university itself is essentially 
the same ; indeed, its organization has been 



COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 137 

effected largely by men who had studied in 
the German universities, and who desired to 
develop in the United States a similar vehicle 
for the highest form of the scientific activity 
of the nation. The three fundamental princi- 
ples that the German universities have estab- 
lished and brilliantly illustrated, Lehrfreiheit, 
Lernfreiheit, and the pursuit of science for its 
own sake, are fully recognized in the American 
universities ; although it cannot be said that 
the third principle is as fully lived up to as 
it ought to be. Professor Paulsen has himself 
pointed out in his latest publication on the 
subject 1 that the peculiar character of the Ger- 
man university lies in the fact that it closely 
connects research and teaching. At present 
complaint is made that the one aim, research, 
is too largely pursued at the expense of the 
other, with the undoubted result, as a German 
university professor admits,^ that, considered 
merely as teaching institutions, the American 
universities surpass the German in efficiency. 

1 Deutsche Bundschaii, September, 1894. 

2 Professor Hugo Miinsterberg, quoted in Edticational 
Beview, VII, 204. 



138 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 

The emphasis often laid on teaching, at the 
expense of research, in the American universi- 
ties is largely due to the fact that the older 
generation of American university professors 
are men who were for many years engaged in 
the work of purely collegiate teaching, and 
they have neither outgrown nor cast off the 
habits and methods of years, nor combined re- 
search with teaching in any marked degree. 
This, of course, is quite as much to be depre- 
cated as an exaggeration of the opposite ten- 
dency. The younger generation of university 
teachers, however, a large proportion of whom 
have been trained in Germany, combine re- 
search with teaching in almost every instance ; 
though, happily, research is not yet reduced 
to work with " the lens, electrode, test-tube, 
and psychometer," which apparently seems to 
Dr. G. Stanley Hall to cover the field of possi- 
ble investigation. 1 It is possible, of course, in 
the enthusiastic devotion to research to over- 
look entirely or to minimize the need of good 
teaching in universities, and also to exaggerate 

1 See " Research the vital spirit of teaching," The 
Forum, August, 1894. 



COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 139 

the influence of research in producing good 
teachers ; but from present indications, this is 
not a source of immediate danger in the United 
States. Our wisest university teachers are in 
agreement with Virchow, who said recently^ 
that the aim of university study is " general 
scientific and moral culture together with the 
mastery of one special department of study." 
The main obstacle to the full establishment 
in America of the pursuit of science for its own 
sake, as a controlling university principle, is 
the development and rapid growth of technical 
schools, with low standards of entrance, in con- 
nection with universities, and their admission 
to a full and even controlling share in univer- 
sity legislation and administration. Indeed, in 
this lies the chief danger to the integrity of 
American university development. Thus far 
the Johns Hopkins University has escaped 
these influences entirely, and Harvard Univer- 
sity has been able to hold them in check. But 
at some other institutions they are strong and 
menacing. The danger consists in allowing 
the claim that closely specialized work in a 
1 Lernen und Forschen (Berlin, 1892), p. 8. 



140 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 

purely technical or professional branch, entered 
upon without any broad preparatory training 
whatever, is to be regarded as legitimate uni- 
versity work and entitled to the time-honored 
university recognition and rewards. It need 
hardly be pointed out to the intelligent reader 
that the tendency to do this is under full head- 
way in the United States, and that its essential 
narrowness and philistinism increase with its 
success in establishing itself. The general 
public attribute unmerited scientific impor- 
tance to technical schools established in con- 
nection with colleges and universities because 
of their large enrollment ; and governing boards 
look upon them with favor both because of the 
influence they exert through their graduates 
and because they are often important sources 
of revenue. Both facts tend to divert atten- 
tion and funds from the pursuit of science as 
an end in itself, and to keep that principle 
from controlling university policy as it should. 
The difficulty would be diminished, and per- 
haps removed, if these technical schools (law, 
medicine, technology, and the like) were put 
upon a true university basis by insisting upon 



COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 141 

a liberal education as a prerequisite for admis- 
sion to them. This would bring about a con- 
dition analogous to that which prevails in 
Germany, and would raise the American uni- 
versities to a plane that they have never yet 
occupied. For, with the exception of the 
medical school at the Johns Hopkins Univer- 
sity and the law school at Harvard, there are 
no professional schools in America of univer- 
sity rank. The others, without exception, admit 
to their courses and degrees immature students 
who have had only a partial secondary school 
training, or often no training at all. When 
such a state of affairs exists within a university 
organization, it is apparent that the technical 
or professional schools are an injury rather 
than a legitimate source of pride and strength, 
no matter how many hundreds of students they 
may attract. Indeed, the larger they become 
the greater is their influence for evil, for their 
teaching is necessarily brought down to the 
level of the least-trained intelligences among 
the heterogeneous body of students, and in this 
way the standard of the whole university is 
lowered. 



142 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 

So far as this tendency exists in the case of 
schools of applied science, it must be confessed 
that its existence is largely due to the attitude 
of the partisans of the old-fashioned uniform 
college course. By refusing to mathematical 
and scientific studies an equal place by the 
side of Greek and Latin, they forced the 
schools of science to establish themselves — 
in many cases on the narrowest possible edu- 
cational basis — outside of the college and in 
competition with it ; when, with a broad and 
generous treatment of the problems involved, 
the scientific or technical course might have 
been grafted on the college in a way that 
would have been of inestimable value both to 
the technical school and to the college, and 
greatly to the advantage of the cause of lib- 
eral education. The time when this could 
have been accomplished easily is past; but it 
can yet be brought about if undertaken in the 
right spirit and with wisdom. 

It is seemingly impossible for universities 
generally to raise their schools of law and 
medicine to university rank in the face of 
public indifference as to the educational quali- 



COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 143 

fications of lawyers and physicians. How 
long this indifference will continue unmoved, 
there are no means of determining. Here and 
there efforts are making to insist upon some 
portion, at least, of a secondary education as a 
qualification for admission to schools of law 
and medicine. But as a rule admission to the 
practice of those professions is open to any 
one, however ignorant, who will serve a short 
term of apprenticeship. This arrangement is 
sometimes defended on the ground that many 
men have in the past greatly distinguished 
themselves as lawyers or physicians, though 
without any liberal education whatever. This 
is true, but they were rare exceptions; and 
they become rarer each year as competition 
grows closer and more pressing. So far as 
law, at least, is concerned, one reason for the 
prevailing laxity may be found in the fact 
that this profession offers the easiest mode of 
entrance into politics ; and to engage in that 
field of activity is often a chief aim in the 
minds of many young men who have no desire 
for a liberal education. But whatever public 
opinion may rest satisfied with, it seems indis- 



144 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 

putable that universities owe it to themselves 
to put their stamp upon no graduates in law, 
medicine and technology who are not liberally 
educated men. 

When the technical and professional schools 
shall have been raised to true university rank, 
one series of problems will be solved ; but 
others will remain. It is as necessary in 
America as Paulsen describes it to be in Ger- 
many, to conserve the unity of the university 
about the historic faculty of philosophy as a 
centre. This faculty is at once the essence 
of a university and its true glory. Standing 
alone it may justify the title university, as 
the history of the Johns Hopkins University 
for twenty years amply demonstrates. But to 
make it subordinate or to keep it weak and 
unimportant, whether by subdivision or other 
means, is to sap the university's life-blood. 
The faculty of philosophy represents, when un- 
divided, the unity of knowledge and the true 
catholicity of scholarly investigation. Through 
it each department of study is kept in sympa- 
thy with its fellows, and each strengthens and 
supports the rest. When dissevered, its parts 



COLLEGE AND UNIVEKSITY 145 

tend to become mere Fachschulen ; and the 
highest ideals of university life are sacrificed. 
No stronger evidence in support of this opin- 
ion can be cited than the emphatic statements 
on the subject made by du Bois-Reymond, 
the physiologist, and by Hofmann, the chemist, 
in their inaugural addresses on assuming the 
rectorship of the University of Berlin in 1869 
and 1880, respectively. These are the words 
of du Bois-Reymond : " The philosophical fac- 
ulty forms the connecting link between the 
remaining faculties. . . . The reciprocal ac- 
tion of the different branches of human knowl- 
edge which takes place within the philosophical 
faculty, would naturally be lost with its divi- 
sion, but this mutual influence contributes 
very much to widen the vision of the individ- 
ual, and to preserve in him a right judgment 
of his position in relation to the whole. The 
two divisions of the faculty would finally ap- 
proach the character of special schools ; the 
ideal stamp of the whole would be destroyed."^ 
And eleven years later Hofmann defended the 
same position with equal vigor. 

1 Ueher Universitdts-EinricMungen (Berlin, 1869), p. 15. 



146 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 

The faculty of philosophy, or of arts and 
sciences, must not only be preserved in its 
integrity, but its spirit must dominate the 
whole university. As has recently been offi- 
cially pointed out,^ " The safety of the uni- 
versity spirit demands that the university 
proper [the faculty of philosophy] be counted 
as one part, and the collected schools [tech- 
nical and professional] together as another 
rather than that each professional and technical 
faculty shall claim a coordinate right with 
the foundation faculty, which would thus be 
made, not a half, but a seventh (or possibly 
one-twentieth, as the schools multiplied) of 
the university which but for it could have no 
real existence." This is still another lesson 
that the administrators of American univer- 
sities have yet to learn. 

One other danger, common to all universities, 
whether German or American, lies in the ex- 
cessive specialization which is so often warmly 
recommended to university students. Its inev- 
itable result is loss of ability to see things in 

1 See Beport of the Secretary of the University of the state 
of New York for 1893, p. 176. 



COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 147 

their proper proportions, as well as loss of 
sympathy with learning as a whole. Perhaps 
the division of labor cannot be carried too far 
for the value of the product, but certainly it 
can be carried too far for the good of the 
laborer. 

" Denn nur der grosse Gegenstand vermag 
Den tiefen Grund der Menschheit aufzuregen, 
Im engen Kreis verengert sich der Sinn." 

Signs are not wanting that this narrowing of 
view and of sympathy is already taking place ; 
but the university has in the faculty of phi- 
losophy the means to correct it if it will. 
What science and practical life alike need is 
not narrow men, but broad men sharpened to 
a point. To train such is the highest func- 
tion of the American university ; and by its 
success in producing them must its efQciency 
be finally judged. 



THE FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY 
SCHOOL 



An Address 

delivered before the 

Schoolmasters' Association of New York and vicinity, 

March 8, 1890 



THE FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY 
SCHOOL 

Matthew Arnold has reminded us that 
the secondary school is the most ancient 
of existing educational institutions. It ante- 
dates the university by several centuries; and 
by its side the primary or elementary school, 
springing as it does from needs and ideas that 
are comparatively modern, seems but a creature 
of yesterday. Moreover, the history of the sec- 
ondary school is unbroken and easily traceable. 
The monastery schools and the famous estab- 
lishments at St. Gall, Reichenau, and Fulda are 
the direct ancestors of our Etons and Rugbys, 
of our contemporary lycees, gymnasia, and 
academies. 

In the United States the educational organi- 
zation is so indefinite and unformed, and the 
educational terminology in common use so un- 
151 



152 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 

systematic, that certain explanations are neces- 
sary before any discussion of the province and 
scope of the secondary school may be under- 
taken. The threefold division of instruction 
into primary or elementary, secondary, and su- 
perior, has been accepted by the Bureau of 
Education at Washington, and is in accord 
with the practice on the continent of Europe. 
By superior instruction is meant that given in 
institutions empowered by law to confer de- 
grees. This may be either general or special, 
and includes in this country the colleges and 
universities as well as the professional schools 
of law, medicine, theology, education, agricult- 
ure, pharmacy, engineering, and the like. The 
implication is, though unfortunately not always 
the fact, that these institutions for superior 
instruction have required of applicants for 
admission the possession of an approved sec- 
ondary education. By primary or elementary 
instruction is meant such as the state is justi- 
fied in requiring of all children for its own 
safety and perpetuity. In the present state 
of educational science this may safely be held 
to include a knowledge of reading and writing, 



FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 153 

and some instruction in elementary arithmetic, 
geography, history, natural science, and manual 
training. This elementary education should 
begin not later than the sixth year of life and 
with the average child seven years may be 
devoted to it, although specially intelligent 
or studious children may be permitted, as in 
France, to complete the prescribed studies in 
less time. 

It would seem natural, then, that the field 
of secondary instruction should be that which 
lies between the elementary and the superior 
schools. But this is not quite true. There 
is and can be no sharp line of division between 
the various grades of instruction. They pass 
gradually, even insensibly, into each other. In 
order to prevent the pupil's development from 
being arrested and his capacity for education 
from being brought to an end, he must con- 
stantly be led on to new heights. For this 
reason certain studies, usually classed as be- 
longing to secondary education, such as algebra 
and a foreign language, are very appropriately 
taught in the upper grades of the elementary 
school. A beginning in the field of secondary 



154 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 

studies is therefore made before the limits of 
the elementary school are reached, and by 
the time that the pupil is twelve, eleven, or 
even ten years of age. This is actually the 
case with the French lycee and the Prussian 
gymnasium. 

At the upper end of the secondary school 
course a similar condition is found. There is 
no reason why many secondary schools, partic- 
ularly public high schools, over 60 per cent, of 
whose graduates do not go on to a higher edu- 
cational institution, should not give instruc- 
tion in subjects such as logic, political economy, 
and trigonometry, which are contained in every 
college course. Unless this policy is adopted, 
the vast majority of American boys and girls 
will be deprived of all opportunity to come 
in contact with these studies and others like 
them. 

In the past the secondary school in this 
country has been very often dwarfed in im- 
portance and deprived of its proper spontane- 
ity and individuality, because it has permitted 
itself to settle down to the routine task of 
preparing pupils for entrance examination to 



EUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 155 

college, fixed and conducted by the college 
authorities. Whatever that entrance exami- 
nation demanded, and in some cases just a 
trifle more, has been taught ; whatever such 
examination did not call for, no matter how 
important or valuable it might be for a boy's 
education, has not been taught. The second- 
ary school has been too largely dominated by 
the college ; and in few cases has that domina- 
tion been other than unfortunate. As notable 
instances of the contrary effect may be men- 
tioned the stimulating influence of the more 
recent regulations regarding entrance examina- 
tions adopted by Harvard College, particularly 
in geometry and in physics, and the novel 
unity and thoroughness imparted to the in- 
struction in English in the secondary schools 
by the action of the colleges in uniting with 
the schools in deciding upon a uniform 
scheme of requirements for entrance in that 
subject. 

It is neither proper nor dignified for the 
secondary schools to continue in this con- 
dition of dependence upon college entrance 
examinations. They should be independent 



156 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDAEY SCHOOL 

and self-centred. By a careful study of tlie 
history and principles of education, coupled 
with the teachings of their own large experi- 
ence, they should seek to devise that course 
of study and those methods of instruction 
that are best suited to the mental, moral, and 
physical development and culture of the boys 
and girls committed to their care. Nor need 
it be feared that in so doing they will in- 
terfere in any way with the preparation of 
their pupils for college work. For in educa- 
tion it is profoundly true that that which is 
intrinsically the best in any particular stage 
of development, is also the best preparation 
for that which comes after. 

If the American boy is to obtain his bacca- 
laureate degree at the age of twenty or 
twenty-one (which is considerably more than 
a year later than the French boys leave the 
lycee and the Prussian boys the gymnasium), 
he must be ready to enter college not later 
than seventeen ; and this can be managed 
while actually providing for the secondary 
school a more comprehensive curriculum than 
at present obtains. Before discussing in de- 



FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 157 

tail the composition of such a curriculum, 
one or two preliminary considerations must 
be mentioned. They may, however, be dis- 
missed very briefly, since they have so re- 
cently been treated with the highest authority 
by President Eliot. ^ The first of these has 
to do with the length of the school day and 
that of the vacations. The former should 
never be less than five full hours of study 
and school discipline ; the tendency to shorten 
it any further is irrational and should be 
checked. A programme arranged on sound 
educational principles can occupy five hours 
a day easily enough without in any way im- 
pairing the pupil's health or lessening his 
interest, unless the teacher is peculiarly lack- 
ing in mental equipment and professional 
qualifications. The vacations are now unduly 
long, and seem to be yielding to a certain 
strong social pressure to make them even 
longer. The old-fashioned summer vacation 
of four or six weeks has long since become 
one of ten or twelve, and in our city schools 

1 Can school programmes be shortened and enriched ? 
Atlantic Monthly, August, 1888, pp. 250-258. 



158 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 

a summer vacation of fifteen or even sixteen 
weeks is by no means a curiosity. It is the 
teacher who needs this vacation more than 
the pupil. But even from his standpoint the 
present practice has gone beyond reasonable 
bounds. The German method of giving three 
weeks at Easter, one at Pfingster, six in mid- 
summer, one at Michaelmas, and two at Christ- 
mas seems wiser than ours, for it makes a 
more frequent alternation between work and 
play. Perhaps sixteen weeks — including the 
recesses at Christmas and Easter and a long 
summer vacation, as better suited to our cli- 
mate and habits of life than the German plan 
— might be agreed upon as the maximum 
period in which school duties may wisely be 
suspended each year. 

But in addition to the school year of thirty- 
six weeks and twenty -five hours in each week, 
the secondary schools are sadly in need of 
better trained teachers. It is remarkable how 
entirely the teachers in these schools have re- 
mained uninfluenced by the great interest in 
the science and art of teaching which has 
of late years manifested itself both in this 






FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 159 

country and in Europe. Secure in their pos- 
session of a considerable amount of knowledge 
and of more or less culture, the secondary 
school teachers have not seemed to under- 
stand the significance or the value of a pro- 
fessional preparation. As a result their work 
has been done in a routine, imitative way and 
their pupils have suffered. Most of the criti- 
cisms that may now be legitimately made 
upon the work of the secondary schools would 
be disarmed if the teachers in these schools 
were abreast of the present development of 
their art. One important reason why the sec- 
ondary schools have not felt this full measure 
of progress in methods of teaching that is so 
marked in the elementary schools, is that sec- 
ondary teachers are usually college graduates, 
and the colleges have, until very recently, 
done so little to show that they are aware 
of what is being accomplished in the study of 
education. Consequently they have failed to 
contribute their proper proportion of duly 
qualified teachers. Until the colleges assume 
their full responsibility in this matter and en- 
deavor to discharge it, the work of the sec- 



160 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 

ondary school, speaking broadly, will not be 
as well done as it might be. 

Assuming that more competent teachers are 
at hand and that a school year of thirty-six 
weeks of twenty-five hours each is agreed 
upon, what should be the aim of the instruc- 
tion in the secondary school and with what 
curriculum should it endeavor to accomplish 
it? It should be the aim of the secondary 
school, I take it, by instruction and discipline 
to lay the foundation for that cultivation and 
inspiration that mark the truly educated man. 
In endeavoring to attain this ideal, the second- 
ary school must not lose sight of the fact 
that it is educating boys who are to assume 
the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, 
and who must, in all probability, pursue a 
specific calling for the purpose of gaining a 
livelihood. The fact that the secondary school 
has also a selective function to perform is 
often overlooked. Yet this is most important. 
Secondary school pupils are adolescents, and 
their tastes and capacities are rapidly forming 
and finding expression. To afford opportunity 
for these to develop, and to encourage them to 



FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 161 

develop along the best and most effective lines, 
is an obvious duty of the secondary school. 
Because they are not selective, many secondary 
courses of study are very ineffective. 

To prepare a course of study which shall 
keep all these points in mind, and at the same 
time afford the developing intellect of the 
pupil that exercise of which it is capable, is 
not an easy task. Indeed, it presents some 
problems which but a little while ago seemed 
almost impossible of solution. But patience, 
wider experience, and a careful study of the 
surrounding conditions have lessened the dif- 
ficulties. The chief of these is perhaps that 
created by the rapid development and present 
importance of scientific and technical schools. 
These institutions represent a real and signifi- 
cant movement in modern civilization. They 
have complicated the question of a curriculum 
for secondary schools by demanding a prepara- 
tion quite different from that required for en- 
trance to the average American college. That 
the problem thus raised belongs to the field of 
secondary education in general and is not due 
to conditions prevailing in any one country 



162 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDAEY SCHOOL 

alone, is shown by the fact that England, 
Germany, and France have all been brought 
face to face with it as we have been. In each 
of these countries much progress towards its 
solution has been made. In England the so- 
called "modern side" has been added to the 
traditional classical course. In France the 
lycee has its cours special in which mathe- 
matics and the sciences replace Latin and 
Greek. In Germany the well-established real- 
gymnasium and real-schule are every year 
justifying their right to exist on an equal plane 
with the gymnasium itself. A specially inter- 
esting movement in this connection is one in 
Germany which has for some time past been 
calling for the establishment of an EinJieits- 
schule, in which the main features both of 
gymnasium and real-schule are to be combined. 
The course of study that I would suggest 
for the typical American secondary school 
is one in which nine elements are always 
represented : namely, the mother-tongue, ge- 
ography and history, natural science, mathe- 
matics, Latin, Greek, French and German, 
drawing and constructive work (manual train- 



FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 163 

ing), and physical training. It combines some 
features of the English "modern side" with 
some of those of the French cours special^ 
and is not unlike what German students of 
education have in mind under the name of Ein- 
heitsschule . It involves beginning the study 
of one foreign language at ten or eleven 
years of age, and the elements of algebra 
and of plane geometry shortly afterward. 
Ample choice would be permitted to students, 
provided only that not more than five so-called 
''book" subjects were carried on at once, that 
no two new languages were begun at the same 
time, and that English, geography and history, 
and natural science were always represented. 
Pupils of a different temperament, of different 
points of view, and with different purposes in 
life would be guided to express and to satisfy 
themselves to the fullest extent possible. The 
ability to read intelligently, to write legibly, 
and to perform understandingly and correctly 
with integers the four fundamental operations 
of arithmetic, must be insisted upon at ten 
years of age. 

The growing practice of postponing even 



164 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 

this modicum of knowledge until after the 
tenth year is to be emphatically discouraged. 
Attention has recently been called to the fact 
that one of the best-known academies in the 
United States requires for admission only some 
knowledge of common school arithmetic, writ- 
ing, spelling, and the elements of English 
grammar, and that the average age of pupils 
on entering is sixteen and one-half years. At 
this age the French boy is reading Cicero, Vir- 
gil, and Horace, Sophocles and Plato, Shakspere 
and Tennyson, as well as studying general his- 
tory, solid geometry, and chemistry. His Ger- 
man contemporary is similarly advanced. It is 
very evident that at this point there is a tremen- 
dous waste in our educational system. It must 
be remedied and remedied speedily, if our higher 
education is not to be discredited altogether. 

What I intend to include under each of the 
topics of study above enumerated may be 
briefly outlined. 

1 English — The study of the mother tongue 
must not be neglected by any class of students. 
But it must be far better taught than now and 
with a different aim. That the instruction in 



FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 165 

English, both in school and college, has been 
sadly neglected and little developed in the past, 
will not be denied. Perhaps no one but the col- 
lege professor who requires original written work 
from his pupils, knows how insufficient and in- 
efficient the English teaching in the secondary 
school is. A very large proportion of those 
students who reach the baccalaureate degree 
do not possess the ability to express with 
accuracy and conciseness, whether orally or in 
writing, even a simple train of thought. This 
woeful neglect of the mother tongue has been 
largely due, as Paulsen points out is the case in 
Germany, to the great preponderance of classi- 
cal instruction and the impression that this 
afforded all the linguistic training necessary. 
We have gradually emancipated ourselves from 
the tyranny of this notion ; and now the long- 
neglected study of the mother tongue is begin- 
ning to receive proper recognition in schools of 
every grade. Our ideals for this study are no 
longer satisfied by the plodding through a 
grammar and by the memorizing of a few rules 
and canons of rhetoric. Language study, and 
particularly that of a tongue so rich, so versa- 



166 EUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 

tile and so intrinsically interesting as our own, 
means far more than that. 

The general aim of this instruction in the 
secondary school should be to impart a know- 
ledge of the principal laws of structure and syn- 
tax, to develop ease, fluency, and correctness in 
speaking and writing, to point out the principal 
stages in the history of English literature, and 
to bring the pupil to an acquaintance with some 
of the great masterpieces of prose and verse. 
Wide but carefully chosen reading and frequent 
and systematic exercises in composition are the 
most efficient means of instruction. It should 
be remarked, however, that composition writing 
is valuable only if the pupil's work is care- 
fully and intelligently corrected and criticised. 
Otherwise it is a positive evil, for it serves to 
exaggerate and make habitual faults already 
present in the use of language. It is of the 
highest importance that the pupil should be 
accustomed to hear correct English spoken. 
Downright inaccuracy of speech should be con- 
sidered sufficient reason for a teacher's removal. 
A boy will learn more evil in a week from 
a bad example than he will derive good 



FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 167 

from a book in a month. Most language in- 
struction should be oral and the pupil should 
from the very first take a large part in the ex- 
ercises. As language is but the form and ex- 
pression of thought, care should be taken to see 
that thought is always expressed by it. This 
cannot be the case if the pupil is forced ahead 
either too rapidly or in an unnatural course. 
The amount of time proposed for this branch of 
study is therefore comparatively large, and no 
class should be relieved of the necessity of 
writing dictations-exercises or compositions at 
least as often as once a week. When this is 
done and done properly in the secondary school, 
the college instruction in English may enter 
upon that which really belongs to it, and will 
no longer be compelled to devote itself, as 
now, almost wholly to what President Charles 
Kendall Adams once happily described as " the 
flagellation of bad English." Nor should it 
be forgotten that the secondary school must 
bear its share in teaching pupils how and what 
to read, in the best and deepest sense of that 
phrase. No English instruction is entirely 
successful unless it implants in every pupil 



168 FUNCTION OF THE SECOND AEY SCHOOL 

a love of the masters of thought and style and 
a desire to grow more and more familiar with 
them. 

2 G-eograpJiy and History — These comple- 
mentary studies, inseparable from each other 
and indispensable to a sound education, have 
also been sadly neglected in the secondary 
schools. We might truthfully say of the 
Americans, as Breal said a few years ago of 
his fellow Frenchmen, that they are celebrated 
for' their ignorance of geography. The subject 
has been so badly taught that it might almost 
as well have been passed over altogether. We 
are now beginning to follow the example set 
us by Germany in teaching geography, and 
perhaps in a few years it will be adequately 
presented in the schools. Geography has two 
distinct aims. It seeks to point out and de- 
scribe the character, the divisions, the climate, 
and the configuration of the surface of the globe 
that we inhabit, and also to trace the modifi- 
cations which man himself has made and the 
artificial divisions that he has marked off upon 
it. When dealing with the former questions 
geography is physical; when considering the 



FUNCTION OF THE SECOND AEY SCHOOL 169 

latter it is political and commercial. It thus 
occupies a position between the natural and the 
historical sciences and connects the two. 

When geography is properly taught, the child 
is first led to observe his immediate surround- 
ings. The points of the compass, relative situa- 
tions and distances, the real significance of a map, 
may all be taught and best taught with reference 
to the city, town, or village in which the partic- 
ular school is situated. The schoolroom should 
be well supplied with globes, relief maps, 
charts, and other illustrative material, in order 
that, when the pupil passes from the considera- 
tion of his immediate surroundings to that of 
localities at a distance, his understanding may 
receive the assistance of these symbolic repre- 
sentations. When political and commercial 
geography is undertaken, its close relation with 
history makes it both advisable and necessary 
to teach both subjects together. Perhaps no 
study that is pursued at this age brings to the 
pupil a richer store of facts or a greater in- 
tellectual stimulus than do these. Historical 
teaching proper will of course begin with the 
narration of the lives of great men and the 



170 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 

story of their achievements. About this as a 
nucleus may be grouped a considerable body of 
facts and an account of the tendencies set in 
operation by leaders of thought and action. 
This mode of presentation familiarizes the 
pupil from the first with the human factor, 
the spiritual force, in history. The scope of 
the historical teaching in an American second- 
ary school should include an accurate know- 
ledge of the main facts in the history of the 
United States and of England, as well as a 
general acquaintance with the progress of uni- 
versal history. 

3 Mathematics — Whether or not Sir Wil- 
liam Hamilton was justified in his unfavorable 
judgment as to the value of mathematical 
study, it seems clear that our schools have 
devoted too much time to the subject. Un- 
der the guise of mathematics much has been 
taught that is not mathematics at all. Ab- 
struse and very absurd problems and puzzles in 
logic are to be found in almost every mathe- 
matical text-book under the delusive head- 
ing of ''Examples." These simply vex and 
discourage the student and arouse in him a 



FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 171 

distaste for what is really valuable and prac- 
tical in mathematical study. They should be 
passed over entirely, as should also many of 
the complexities of commercial arithmetic, and 
all but three or four of the tables of weights 
and measures. The metric system must be 
taught as a matter of course. The elements 
of plane geometry should precede algebra for 
every reason known to sound educational 
theory. It is more fundamental, it is more 
concrete, and it deals with things and their 
relations rather than with symbols. In the 
form of what the Germans call Raumlehre^ 
many geometrical facts would be taught from 
the first, in the proposed curriculum, under 
the head of drawing and constructive work. 
When the formal proofs of geometry are later 
entered upon, they will therefore be seen to 
be easy and natural, rather than difficult and 
wholly strange. Good teaching in mathe- 
matics should enable the student who follows 
a classical course during the last three years 
in the secondary school, to enter college with 
a good understanding of arithmetic, algebra 
and geometry, both plane and solid. The 



1T2 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 

student selecting a scientific course in the 
secondary school could add to this a know- 
ledge of analytic geometry, of trigonometry, 
and perhaps of determinants as well. 

4 Natural Science — This is a term of wide 
and varying significance. As used here, it 
has two meanings. During the earlier years 
of the course, it is equivalent to the term 
NaturhescJireihung as used in German school- 
programmes. Applied to the later years, it 
means the experimental study of chemistry 
and physics. In the lower grades it is not 
specifically physics or chemistry or geology 
or botany or physiology or astronomy that 
is studied, but something of all these. The 
subject-matter is found in the facts of nature 
which surround the child on every hand, and 
which should be as familiar to him as the 
names he hears. This instruction aims to 
open the pupil's eyes, to teach him how and 
what to see, and to appreciate what the word 
nature means. It is the most fascinating of 
school studies ; and it complements and runs 
into almost every other subject. 

5, 6 Latin and Grreek — In the secondary 



FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 173 

schools of Europe, Latin still occupies the 
leading place. Greek is begun later than 
Latin, and when the Latin is well taught 
Greek needs less time and effort for the mastery 
of so much of it as is desirable during the 
period of secondary instruction. Inasmuch as 
both serve practically the same purpose in 
education, they may properly be spoken of 
under a single head. 

It seems quite safe to predict that no cult- 
ure will ever be considered broad and deep 
unless it rests upon an understanding and 
appreciation of the civilizations of Greece and 
Rome. Whether such culture is necessary or 
even desirable for the great body of the pop- 
ulation, and whether the classics are properly 
taught or not, are very different questions 
from that which is raised as to their educa- 
tional value. It is only as respects one or 
the other of the former that recent criticism 
and attack have been in any degree success- 
ful. The classics have suffered from being 
forced upon those who cared nothing for 
them and would care nothing. They have 
also suffered, and very severely, through the 



174 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 

waste of time they have involved. But both 
of these objections may be removed without 
weakening in any degree the position of the 
classics. To the charge of bad and wasteful 
methods of classical teaching, much of it done 
under the guise of thoroughness, the schools 
must plead guilty. They have been endeav- 
oring to make philologists out of the mate- 
rial afforded by the average schoolboy. The 
greatest value of the classics is found in the 
ability to read and understand the great poets, 
philosophers, and historians who wrote for all 
time in the Greek and Latin tongues. The 
boasted discipline of classical study for the 
attention and reasoning powers may be quite 
as well obtained from studies which touch 
more closely the practical life of the great 
mass of the population. This argument is, 
therefore, not only unsound, but needless for 
the classicist to use, since he has at his com- 
mand others that are stronger and more effec- 
tive. To know something of the spirit of 
Sophocles, Demosthenes, and Plato, of Cicero, 
Horace, and Tacitus, and to understand the 
civilizations and the points of view that they 



FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 175 

represent, are, from one point of view, almost 
enough to give the fortunate one a claim to cult- 
ure. The wearisome grammatical drill and the 
tedious reiteration of details that are relatively 
of little value, save in so far as these are abso- 
lutely necessary to enable the pupil to read 
intelligently, are out of place in secondary edu- 
cation. The proper aim of classical instruction 
at this period is stated with great clearness and 
force in the comments on the course of study 
furnished by the Prussian Minister of Public 
Instruction to the teachers in the most suc- 
cessful secondary school yet devised, the gym- 
nasium. The Minister says : — 

" So far as the end to be attained by a know- 
ledge of language is concerned, it is hardly neces- 
sary to adduce arguments to justify the proposition 
that the acquisition of a vocabulary is of at least 
as much importance as familiarity with grammati- 
cal details. For it is just by means of this vocabu- 
lary that satisfaction is gained as facility in reading 
is acquired ; by means of it, too, interest in reading 
extends beyond the period of school life. The aim 
of the gymnasium is not, however, attained when 
the pupils are able merely to read works of a certain 
degree of difficulty. Emphasis is much rather to 



176 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 

be laid upon the fact that they have read works of a 
certain scope and character, and upon the manner in 
which they have read them. As regards the method 
of reading, two points must be kept in mind; it 
must be based upon verbal accuracy and it must 
lead to an appreciation of the thought which is 
expressed and the form chosen for its expression. 
On the former consideration rests the disciplinary 
value of the classics ; on the latter the basis of that 
which, when fully developed, is designated as 
classical culture. A treatment of this reading 
which neglects grammatical and lexical exactness, 
leads to superficiality; a treatment which makes 
the acquisition of grammatical and lexical exact- 
ness the main aim of reading, overlooks a funda- 
mental reason for the teaching of Latin in the 
gymnasium. Special attention must be called to 
this latter error, for it endangers both the interest 
of the students in the study of the ancient lan- 
guages and the reputation of the gymnasium 
among its most thoughtful supporters, by turning 
the teaching of the classics, even in the highest 
grades, into a mere repetition of grammatical rules 
and a memorizing of minute details as to synonyms 
and style." 



This applies to the United States quite as 
well as to Prussia, and to the study of Greek 



FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 177 

as much as to that of Latin. When these 
directions are followed it will be easy enough 
to read considerably more of the classics than 
is now done in the secondary schools, and to 
do it in the time at the teacher's disposal. It 
may also be observed that the grammatical de- 
tails of different languages, when alike, should 
be studied once for all and not repeated for 
every new language taken up. Devices for 
carrying out this suggestion have been pre- 
pared under the form of parallel grammars and 
are now used in a few schools both in this 
country and in Great Britain. 

As a rule the classical teacher has not appre- 
ciated the changed educational conditions and 
the new demands made upon the schools. He 
has therefore provoked antagonism when he 
should have invited cooperation. He must 
recognize that while the secondary school can- 
not dispense with the classics, it can no longer 
be completely dominated by them. 

7 French and German — These are indis- 
pensable in the secondary school. It was 
Goethe who said, " A man who knows only his 
own language does not know even that." 



178 FUNCTION OF THE SECOND AEY SCHOOL 

One modern language should be begun early 
and studied continuously for several years. 
To some it may seem a matter of indifference 
whether French or German is first taken up. 
But French seems to offer to the English- 
speaking student more difficulties of pronun- 
ciation and of idiom than German, and should 
therefore be begun before the pupil has ac- 
quired very fixed notions of grammatical and 
rhetorical canons. Moreover, the relation be- 
tween French and Latin seems to furnish a 
good reason for making the two, to a certain 
extent, interdependent and illustrative, the one 
of the other. An ability to read French, to 
understand it when spoken, and in some meas- 
ure to write it and to speak it having been 
attained, the mastery of a certain amount of 
German will involve fewer difficulties, and the 
boy may enter college or the scientific school 
with a good reading knowledge, and perhaps 
something more, of both of these indispensable 
keys to culture ; or he may postpone the 
second modern language until the college 
period is entered upon. 

8 Drawing and Constructive Work — To in- 



FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 179 

trocluce this subject generally into the sec- 
ondary schools of this country would be a 
new departure. It is so, however, only be- 
cause these schools have not been doing their 
duty by the pupils entrusted to them. Taken 
together, drawing and constructive work con- 
stitute what is properly called manual training, 
the educational value of which has been estab- 
lished beyond all contravention both by argu- 
ment and by experiment. It aims to develop 
in the pupil powers of thought-expression that 
no other study reaches, as well as to train the 
judgment, to call out the executive powers, and 
to give self-confidence in dealing with actual 
material. It serves also to illustrate much of 
the instruction in mathematics and in natural 
science. Many secondary school pupils may 
wish to follow manual training beyond the 
mere rudiments and with more especial refer- 
ence to its scientific and technological applica- 
tions. 

It may be added, for the sake of definite- 
ness, that the constructive work will naturally 
employ for its material pasteboard, clay, soft 
wood, and metal, successively. 



180 FUNCTION OE THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 

9 Physical Training — For obvious reasons 
this important subject finds a place in every 
part of the course. More time is to be allotted 
to it in the earlier years because at that time the 
pupil is less accustomed to the confinement of 
the schoolroom and to the strain of continuous 
mental exertion. At this stage, too, important 
physical habits are formed, for instance those 
of breathing, walking, and sitting ; and when 
formed correctly they reduce somewhat the 
time necessary for systematic bodily training. 
Whenever possible this physical training 
might be given in the open air of a play- 
ground. Such an arrangement not only 
involves a change of surroundings and conse- 
quent rest for the pupil, but it means purer air 
in the lungs, purer blood in the veins, and an 
accompanying exhilaration that is in itself a 
powerful tonic, mental and physical. A valua- 
ble and indeed indispensable accessory of 
physical training is play, the free, unimpeded, 
wilful activity of the child. So great is its 
value that many are of opinion that it makes 
systematic physical training unnecessary. On 
this point I shall merely quote Dr. Hart well, 



FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 181 

who seems to me to have correctly expressed 
the relation between play and systematic 
exercise in his admirable address before the 
Physical Training Conference held in Boston 
in November, 1889. Dr. Hartwell, in speak- 
ing of this matter, said : — 

"I have no disposition to disparage athletic 
sports. I would that they were more general and 
better regulated than they are in our country. I 
believe that they are valuable as a means of recrea- 
tion ; that they conduce to bodily grov/th and im- 
provement; and that their moral effects are of 
value, since they call for self-subordiuation, public 
spirit, and cooperative effort, and serve to reveal 
the dominant characteristics and tendencies, as 
regards the temper, disposition, and force of will 
of those who engage in them. But they bear so 
indelibly the marks of their childish origin, they 
are so crude and unspecialized as to their methods, 
as to render them inadequate for the purposes of a 
thorough-going and broad system of bodily educa- 
tion. It is well to promote them, and it is becom- 
ing increasingly necessary to regulate them ; but it 
is unsafe and short-sighted to consider them as 
constituting anything more than a single stage in 
the best bodily training." 



182 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 

When play and physical training are thus 
carefully distinguished, each is seen to have 
an educational function of its own and neither 
will be substituted for the other. Both are 
necessary in education. 

It is believed that a course made up of these 
nine lines of study well distributed will meet 
all the intellectual wants of the boy from his 
eleventh to his eighteenth year, and will afford 
him a harmonious and complete training. 
Whether the pupil enters an institution of 
higher grade or not, he will have had an edu- 
cation substantially complete in itself. Yet 
for the studies of a higher institution he will 
have received an admirable preparation. The 
secondary school is in this way enabled to 
preserve its place in the general educational 
organization of the country without sacrificing 
its independence. 

No less a man than Darwin has recorded 
the fact that his school-days, so far as his 
education was concerned, were an utter blank. 
Not infrequently men of less reputation, but 
yet prominent in their respective callings, 
express a similar opinion. This in itself is 



FUNCTION OF THE SECOND AKY SCHOOL 183 

a danger signal and must be heeded. The 
school may not with impunity remain long 
out of touch with the spirit which animates 
the intellectual leaders of an age or generation. 
Its task grows more difiicult as civilization 
grows more complex. "The most incessant 
occupation of the human intellect throughout 
life," said John Stuart Mill in his Inaugural 
Address as Rector of St. Andrews University, 
" is the ascertainment of truth." The standards 
of truth and the methods for its discovery must 
be revealed in and by the process of education) 
When this process has been carried so far as to 
entitle the resulting education to be called 
liberal, as Huxley for example has defined 
a liberal education, the youth is prepared to 
live not for himself alone, but for the society of 
which he forms a part and for the race of 
which he is a member. If the secondary school 
fails to obtain this larger view, its training will 
hardly contribute to an education which shall 
be, in the language of Rollin, " the source of 
certain peace and happiness both in the family 
and in the state." 



REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
IN THE UNITED STATES 



From The Atlantic Monthly, March, 1894 



REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
IN THE UNITED STATES 

It has come to be distinctly recognized that 
any far-reaching educational reform in the 
United States must begin with the secondary 
schools. The elementary school is helpless if 
the secondary school refuses to cooperate with 
it in raising the standard of scholarship and 
in improving the methods of instruction ; and 
but few colleges are strong enough to demand 
of the secondary schools more and better work 
than the latter are now doing. Persuasion on 
the part of the colleges has in some cases ac- 
complished a good deal, but the improvement 
has been limited either to one or two subjects 
of instruction, or to the schools of a relatively 
small territory. The secondary schools them- 
selves, not always conducted in a wise or gen- 
erous spirit, have too often sacrificed the 
necessities of sound training to the local de- 
187 



188 REFOKM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

mand for an ambitious programme containing 
twoscore or more school subjects, no one of 
which is pursued far enough or long enough 
for the pupil to derive from it the educational 
value it possesses. Or they have erred on the 
other side, and in their devotion to a past ideal 
have excluded from the curriculum important 
fields of knowledge that have grown up within 
a century. Thus the secondary school has ap- 
peared to many observers not only to scatter 
a pupil's energies and interests, but to delay 
him unduly. The consequence is, as President 
Eliot showed very clearly several years ago, 
that the American boy of fifteen or sixteen, 
no whit inferior to his French or German 
fellow in native ability, is from two to three 
years behind him in acquired knowledge. 

To remedy so apparent an evil as this would 
be an easy task in France or in Prussia. The 
minister of education would consult his official 
advisers, and call the leading educational ex- 
perts to his council ; in a few weeks an order 
would issue prescribing for the schools a new 
and reformed procedure. In this way Lehr- 
plane and Lehraufgaben for the higher schools 



REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 189 

of Prussia were issued in 1882, and again in 
1892. Similarly, in 1890 the existing Plan 
d'Etudes et Programmes of the secondary 
schools in France was promulgated. In this 
country, however, where no central educational 
administration exists, and where bureaucracy 
is not popular, educational reforms can be 
brought about only by persuasion and coopera- 
tion, for no official and no institution is em- 
powered to dictate to us. The press, the plat- 
form, the teachers' meeting, must be availed of 
to put forward new ideas ; and men and women 
in large numbers must be reasoned with and 
convinced in order to secure their acceptance. 
For secondary education, and through it for 
our educational organization generally, a long 
step has been taken in this direction by the 
proceedings that led up to the appointment, 
by the National Educational Association, of 
the Committee of Ten on secondary school 
studies, and by the exceedingly valuable re- 
port which that committee has now laid before 
the public.^ 

1 Published for the National Educational Association, by 
the American Book Company (New York, 1894). 



190 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

For thirty years the National Educational 
Association has been known as a large body 
of teachers that assembled annually to listen 
to addresses and discussions of more or less 
practical value. It has come to command an 
attendance of as many as sixteen thousand 
teachers, of all classes and from every section 
of the country. Its power and authority have 
increased with its size and its representative 
character. In 1892, the directors of this asso- 
ciation determined to pass from the field of 
mere discussion, and begin an educational in- 
vestigation, under their own auspices and paid 
for out of their own funds, that should result 
in some practical gain to the country at large. 
They accepted the suggestion, made to them 
after careful deliberation, that the problems 
connected with secondary education should be 
vigorously and systematically attacked, and 
appointed a committee, which has come to be 
known as the Committee of Ten, to take full 
charge of the task, at the same time appropri- 
ating twenty-five hundred dollars to pay the 
expenses of the work. The members of this 
committee were carefully selected with a view 



REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 191 

to giving representation to the types of edu- 
cational organization most interested, and to 
the various sections of the country. ^ 

The committee was made up of one presi- 
dent of an Eastern university, two presidents 
of Western state universities and one of a 
Southern state university, one president of a 
college for women, one professor in a Western 
college open to both sexes, one head-master 
of an endowed academy, one principal of 
a public high school for both sexes, one 
principal of a public high school for girls 
only, and the Commissioner of Education, 
whose familiarity with the principles and 
practice of education in every part of the 

1 The members of the committee -were : President Charles 
W. Eliot, of Harvard University, chairman; Dr. W. T. 
Harris, Commissioner of Education ; President James B, 
Angell, of the University of Michigan ; President James M. 
Taylor, of Vassar College ; Mr. John Tetlow, Principal of 
the Girls' High and Latin Schools, Boston, Mass. ; Mr. 0. D. 
Robinson, Principal of the Albany (N. Y. ) High School ; 
President James H. Baker, of the University of Colorado ; 
President Richard H. Jesse, of the University of Missouri ; 
Mr. James C. MacKenzie, Head-Master of the Lawrenceville 
(N. J.) School ; and Professor Henry C. King, of Oberlin 
College. 



192 KEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

United States gave representation indirectly 
both to the elementary school interests and 
to the special students of education. 

The procedure adopted by the Committee 
of Ten is fully described in the report to 
which it is the object of this paper to direct 
attention. It may be briefly stated thus : — 

After a study of the whole problem, it was 
decided to appoint nine conferences of ten 
members each, — one conference for each of 
the main divisions of work that fall properly 
to the secondary school. The members of the 
conferences were selected equally, as nearly 
as possible, from college and school instructors 
who had attained a reputation in connection 
with the subject of their conference, due re- 
gard being had also to the representation of 
various educational interests and the several 
sections of the country. Conferences were 
appointed, therefore, on Latin ; Greek ; Eng- 
lish ; other modern languages ; mathemat- 
ics ; physics, astronomy, and chemistry ; 
natural history (biology, including botany, 
zoology, and physiology) ; history, civil gov- 
ernment, and political economy; and geog- 



EEEOEM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 193 

raphy (physical geography, geology, and 
meteorology). The several conferences as- 
sembled in December, 1892, at convenient 
points, and eighty-eight of the ninety members 
were in attendance. Of these eighty-eight, 
forty-six were in the service of colleges and 
universities, forty-one in the service of schools, 
and one was a government official formerly in 
the service of a university. So admirable are 
the lists of members of these conferences that 
it is difficult to speak of them without enthu- 
siasm. Among the ninety names will be found 
many that stand in the foremost rank of Amer- 
ican scholarship ; and no one of the ninety 
was without valuable educational experience 
of some kind. This fact of itself gives great 
weight to their recommendations; and their 
exhaustive reports, which are appended to the 
Report of the Committee of Ten, are a mine 
of educational information and suggestion of 
the utmost value. 

The nine conferences were in session for 
three days, and addressed themselves to the 
task of preparing answers to the searching 
questions submitted to them by the Committee 



194 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

of Ten. These questions, eleven in number, 
were as follows : — 

" (1) In the school course of study, ex- 
tending approximately from the age of six 
years to eighteen years, — a course including 
the periods of both elementary and secondary 
instruction, — at what age should the study 
which is the subject of the Conference be first 
introduced ? 

" (2) After it is introduced, how many 
hours a week for how many years should be 
devoted to it? 

" (3) How many hours a week for how 
many years should be devoted to it during the 
last four years of the complete course ; that 
is, during the ordinary high school period? 

" (4) What topics, or parts, of the subject 
may reasonably be covered during the whole 
course ? 

" (5) What topics, or parts, of the subject 
may best be reserved for the last four years? 

" (6) In what form and to what extent 
should the subject enter into college require- 
ments for admission? Such questions as to 
the sufficiency of translation at sight as a test 



REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 195 

of knowledge of a language, or the superiority 
of a laboratory examination in a scientific sub- 
ject to a written examination on a text-book, 
are intended to be suggested under this head 
by the phrase 'in what form.' 

" (7) Should the subject be treated differ- 
ently for pupils who are going to college, for 
those who are going to a scientific school, 
and for those who, presumably, are going to 
neither ? 

" (8) At what stage should this differentia- 
tion begin, if any be recommended? 

" (9) Can any description be given of the 
best method of teaching this subject through- 
out the school course? 

" (10) Can any description be given of the 
best mode of testing attainments in this sub- 
ject at college admission examinations? 

" (11) For those cases in which colleges 
and universities permit a division of the ad- 
mission examinations into a preliminary and a 
final examination, separated by at least a year, 
can the best limit between the preliminary and 
final examinations be approximately defined?" 

The first impression produced by a study 



196 KEEOEM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

of the reports of the special conferences is 
that their members addressed themselves to 
their task with marked skill and directness. 
The questions submitted to them are answered, 
and answered fully, and the answers are ac- 
companied with the reasons therefor. From 
the standpoint of the old-fashioned prepara- 
tory schoolmaster, ignorant alike of the newer 
school subjects and of the newer methods of 
imparting life to the old ones, the changes 
urged by the conferences may seem many and 
radical. Yet it will be difficult to disprove 
the deliberate conclusion of the Committee of 
Ten that, on the whole, the spirit of the con- 
ferences was conservative and moderate. For 
example, the Latin conference distinctly dis- 
claim any desire to see the college admission 
requirements in Latin increased. The Greek 
conference prefer to see the average age of 
entrance to college lowered rather than raised. 
The mathematics conference recommend the 
actual abridging of the time now devoted to 
arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. The geog- 
raphy conference agree that the time now 
spent upon that subject in the schools is out 



EEFOEM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 197 

of all proportion to the value of the results 
secured. 

As a matter of course, the conferences 
that dealt with the modern languages and 
the several departments of natural science 
had the largest amount of work to do. 
Greek, Latin, and mathematics have been sta- 
ple school subjects for generations. They are 
carefully organized and graded. Adequate 
text-books are provided. A large body of 
teaching experience lies behind each of them. 
Of the other subjects this is not true. They 
appear only sporadically in schools. Too 
often they are taught badly, and their edu- 
cational value is lost. The conferences deal- 
ing with the modern subjects make it clear, 
in every case, how these evils may be 
avoided ; but their reports are correspond- 
ingly longer and more minute than those 
on the other subjects. The conference on 
physics, astronomy, and chemistry, for ex- 
ample, append to their report an elaborate 
outline of experiments to be performed and 
topics to be taught in the secondary school. 
The reports from the conferences on his- 



198 KEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

tory, civil government, and political econ- 
omy, geography, and natural history are 
similarly detailed. 

The recommendations of the conference 
on English will naturally be turned to first ; 
for the tendency to emphasize the importance 
of the study of the mother tongue, and to 
improve the methods of teaching it, is now 
too strong and too general to be resisted, if 
indeed any one wishes to resist it. The 
report of this conference is very short, but 
it is extremely clear and cogent. In sub- 
stance, it says that the proper use of Eng- 
lish can be gained only by using it properly 
in exercises of increasing difficulty and vari- 
ety. The spelling-book is discountenanced. 
Formal grammar is relegated to the subor- 
dinate place that it deserves. The reading- 
book should contain real literature, and not 
articles on physical science or natural his- 
tory, and but little sentimental poetry. In 
the high school it is held that English should 
have as much time allotted to it as Latin, 
and that the two points to be kept con- 
stantly in mind, in the teaching, are the 



KEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 199 

study of literature and training in the ex- 
pression of thought. All this advice is so 
sound that, being now given a quasi-official 
authority, it should be followed generally 
in the secondary schools, both public and 
private. 

The fact that education cannot be cut up 
into artificial periods distinct in themselves 
is brought out by almost every conference. 
They agree in saying that the elementary 
school must improve, and must cooperate 
with the secondary school, if the latter is to 
meet the demands now made upon it. Eng- 
lish teaching cannot be neglected from six 
to thirteen, if good results in it are to be 
obtained from thirteen to seventeen. It is 
facts like this that give the reports of the 
conferences their chief significance. Though 
dealing ostensibly and directly with second- 
ary education only, they reach every nook 
and corner of the elementary school as well. 

It is extremely encouraging, also, to find 
the nine conferences and the Committee of 
Ten, one hundred teachers in all, in cordial 
agreement on many points of fundamental 



I 



200 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

importance. It is laid down, for instance, 
that no school subject should be taught in 
different ways to pupils who are going to 
college, to a scientific school, or to neither. 
If a pupil studies algebra or Latin, he should 
study it in the same way and to the same 
extent, during the time that he studies it, 
whether he is to enter Harvard or Yale, the 
Institute of Technology or the Rensselaer 
Polytechnic, or a merchant's office. On this 
point there is not a single dissenting voice. 
This one principle, if followed in the sec- 
ondary schools, would immensely simplify 
their programmes and decrease the cost of 
their instruction. 

The conferences agree, again, — excepting 
the Greek conference, the members of which 
had no reason for dealing with the subject, 
— that much work now taken up for the 
first time in the secondary school should 
be begun in the elementary school. For 
instance, one foreign language, history, alge- 
bra, and geometry are all capable of excel- 
lent use in the upper grades of elementary 
schools, and are already to be found there 



REFOKM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 201 

in some of the more progressive cities of the 
country. The discussion on shortening and 
enriching the school curriculum, begun so 
recently, has already accomplished this. 

The four conferences on language study 
and the three on natural science also agree 
among themselves as to the best methods of 
teaching. The former are a unit in desir- 
ing reading aloud in the language to be 
studied, the association of writing the lan- 
guage with translating from it, and the care- 
ful correction of translation, in order to 
secure in it the use of accurate and idio- 
matic English. The three scientific confer- 
ences come to a like agreement. They all 
believe that laboratory teaching is better 
than text-book teaching, and that the inspec- 
tion of laboratory notebooks should be com- 
bined with written examinations, in testing 
a pupil's attainments. 

The last, and most important, point of 
agreement among the conferences relates to 
the coordination of the studies in the cur- 
riculum. Neither the Committee of Ten nor 
the conferences contained a single person 



202 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

who may be classed as a follower of the 
Herbartian educational theory, as exempli- 
fied by Ziller, Stoy, and Rein ; yet by purely 
empirical methods the committee and the 
conferences arrive at a striking confirma- 
tion of one of the main doctrines of the 
Herbartian school, the coordination and cor- 
relation of studies. The scientific confer- 
ences show how the practice of writing 
accurate descriptions of observations and 
experiments contributes to the acquirement 
of a clear, simple English style. The con- 
ference on history wish to have that subject 
always associated with the study of geogra- 
phy, and the conference on the latter subject 
agree with them. The English conference 
explicitly ask that the study of the mother 
tongue and its literature be supplemented by 
that of the history and geography of the 
English-speaking race. 

Taking these points alone, and passing 
over the numerous questions of detail on 
which the conferences pronounce, we have 
a considerable body of educational doctrine 
that is sound to the core, and that applies 



REFOEM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 203 

to one school and to one stage of educa- 
tion as well as to another. Principals of 
schools, teachers of special subjects, and 
students of education will examine and 
weigh carefully every recommendation of 
the conferences, however minute ; but the 
general reader and the intelligent parent 
wish most of all to gain an idea of what is 
unanimously, or even generally agreed upon. 
That question is substantially answered in 
the foregoing summary of the conference 
reports. 

To study carefully the several conference 
reports, and to base upon them a general rec- 
ommendation to the country, was the more 
difficult part of the task of the Committee of 
Ten. Any recommendation, to be tangible, 
must of course include a schedule showing 
how a school can arrange its programme so 
as to carry out the ideal of the committee. 
Four such schedules, or tables, are given by 
the committee ; and while not perfect, — what 
school programme is ? — they are extremely 
suggestive. The first table is not a pro- 
gramme, but an ordered arrangement, by topics 



204 REFOEM or SECONDARY EDUCATION 

and school j^ears, of all of the recommendations 
of the nine conferences. It offers material 
for an indefinite number of programmes. The 
second table is given to test the practical char- 
acter of the conference recommendations. It 
includes them all in a four years' course, adding 
to each subject the number of weekly periods 
to be allotted to it. When this is done, it is 
found that for three-fourths of the course 
much more is demanded than any one pupil can 
follow, but — and this is the important point — 
not more than a school can teach. The ne- 
cessary consequence is that there must be in 
the high school a choice or election of studies. 
In a small school, this choice will be made 
by the principal, who will say : " With the 
staff at my command, I can teach only five 
subjects of those proposed by the conferences, 
in the manner recommended. My school shall 
therefore be limited to those five." Larger 
and richer schools can teach more, or perhaps 
all of the subjects ; and then the choice among 
them will be made by the pupil. This choice 
is necessary, as the Committee of Ten is care- 
ful to point out, to thoroughness, and to the 



REFOEM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 205 

imparting of power as distinguished from mere 
information; for any large subject whatever, 
to yield its training value, must be pursued 
through several years, from three to five times 
a week. 

The committee's third table is based on the 
second, but uses four as the standard number 
of weekly periods of study for each subject, 
except in the first year of a new language. 
Further reference to this table is unnecessary. 

The fourth table submitted is of great 
interest, for in it the committee, after due 
deliberation, makes its own selection out of all 
the material and suggestions supplied by the 
conferences, and submits specimen standard 
programmes of secondary school work. It 
would be a grave error to dismiss this ques- 
tion of a specific programme as one involving 
mere detail that might be left to any principal 
or superintendent of schools. The Committee 
of Ten itself dissents strongly from that view ; 
for it believes that to establish just proportions 
between the several subjects, or groups of 
allied subjects, it is essential that each prin- 
cipal subject shall be taught adequately and 



206 EEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

extensively, and therefore proper provision for 
it must be made in the programme. As the 
committee says : " The method of estimating 
the amount of instruction offered in any sub- 
ject by the number of recitation periods as- 
signed to it each week for a given number 
of years or half years is in some respects an 
inadequate one, for it takes no account of 
the scope and intensity of the instruction given 
during the periods ; but so far as it goes it 
is trustworthy and instructive. It represents 
with tolerable accuracy the proportional ex- 
penditure which a school is making on a given 
subject ; therefore the proportional importance 
which the school attaches to that subject. It 
also represents, roughly, the proportion of the 
pupil's entire school time which he can devote 
to a given subject, provided he is free to take 
all the instruction offered in that subject. All 
experience shows that subjects deemed impor- 
tant get a large number of weekly periods, 
while those deemed unimportant get a smaller 
number. Moreover, if the programme time 
assigned to a given subject be insufficient, the 
value of that subject as training cannot be got, 



EEFORM OE SECONDARY EDUCATION 207 

no matter how good the quality of the instruc- 
tion." 

In framing the suggestive programmes, the 
Committee of Ten proceeded upon some gen- 
eral principles that are of great significance. 
In the first place, it endeavored to postpone 
to as late a period as possible the grave choice 
between a classical and what is generally 
known as a Latin-scientific course. Very fre- 
quently this choice determines a boy's future 
career, and it is important that it be made 
not only late in the school course, but after 
excursions into all the principal fields of 
knowledge have discovered the boy's tastes 
and exhibited his qualities. A second prin- 
ciple is that each year of the secondary 
school course should be, so far as may be, 
complete in itself, and not made wholly de- 
pendent on what is to follow. This is essen- 
tial, because thousands of pupils are obliged 
to leave the high school after one or two years, 
and during that time linguistic, historical, 
mathematical, and scientific subjects should 
all be presented to them in an adequate man- 
ner. It is also important that provision be 



208 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

made so that each subject may be treated in 
the same way for all pupils who take it ; that 
time enough be given to each subject to gain 
from it the training it is able to give ; that 
the different principal subjects be put upon 
an approximate equality in the matter of time- 
allotment ; that all short courses given for 
purposes of information only be excluded ; and 
that the instruction in each of the main lines 
— namely, language, history, science, and 
mathematics — be continuous. With all of 
these principles in mind, the Committee of Ten 
framed the four specimen programmes given on 
the three following pages, the names by which 
they are designated being based on the amount 
and character of foreign language study in each. 
In adopting twenty as the maximum num- 
ber of weekly periods of school work, the com- 
mittee had two qualifications in mind : first, 
that at least five of the twenty should be given 
to unprepared work ; secondly, that laboratory 
subjects should have double periods whenever 
that prolongation is possible. Such subjects 
as music, drawing, and elocution, often found 
in secondary schools, are purposely omitted from 



REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 209 



PS 


I 

Classical 

Three Foreign Languages (one 

Modern) 


II 

LATrN-SciENTIFIO 

Two Foreign Languages (one 
Modern) 


1 


Latin . . . . . 5 p.i 

English 4 p. 

Algebra .... 4 p. 

History 4 p. 

Physical Geography 3 p. 
20 p. 


Latin 5 p. 

English 4 p. 

Algebra 4 p. 

History 4 p. 

Physical Geography 3 p. 
20 p. 


2 


Latin 5 p. 

English 2 p. 

German'2 ^q^. French] 

begun .... 4 p. 
Geometry .... 3 p. 

Physics 3 p. 

History .... 3 p. 


Latin 5 p. 

English 2 p. 

German [or French] 

begun .... 4 p. 
Geometry .... 3 p. 

Physics 3 p. 

Botany or Zoology . 3 p. 




20 p. 


20 p. 


3 


Latin 4 p. 

Greek 2. .... 5 p. 

English 3 p. 

German [or French] 4 p. 

Mathematics 
Algebra, 2^ , 
Geometry, 2 / * ' * P" 


Latin 4 p. 

English 3 p. 

German [or French] 4 p. 
Mathematics 

Algebra, 2 ") . 

Geometry ,2 / ' ' * ^• 
Astronomy (J year) 

and Meteorology 

(iyr.) . . . . 3p. 
History 2 p. 




20 p. 


20 p. 



1 Weekly periods. 

2 In any school in which Greek can be better taught than 
a modem language, or in which local public opinion or the 
history of the school makes it desirable to teach Greek in an 
ample way, Greek may be substituted for German or French 
in the second year of the classical programme. 



210 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 



1 

Classical 

Three Foreign Languages (one 

Modern) 



II 

Latin-Scientific 

Two Foreign Languages (one 

Modern) 



Latin 4 p. 

Greek 5 p. 

English 2 p. 

German [or French] 3 p. 

Chemistry .... 3 p. 

Trigonometry and 
Higher Algebra, 

or History ... 3 p. 



20 p. 



Latin 4 p. 

English 

as in Classical, 2 \ 
additional, 2 / 

German [or French] 

Chemistry .... 

Trigonometry and 
Higher Algebra, 
or History . . . 

Geology or Physiog- 
raphy (Jyr.),and 
Anatomy, Physi- 
ology, and Hygiene 
iiji'.) . . . ■ 3 p. 

20 p. 



4 p. 

3 p. 
3 p. 



3 p. 



« 

<! 
W 

h 


III 

Modern Languages 

Two Foreign Languages (both 

Modern) 


IV 

English 

One Foreign Language (Ancient 

or Modern) 


1 


French [or German] 
begun .... 5 p. 

English 4 p. 

Algebra .... 4 p. 
History .... 4 p. 
Physical Geography 3 p. 


Latin, or German, or 
French .... 5 p. 

English 4 p. 

Algebra 4 p. 

History 4 p. 

Physical Geography 3 p. 




20 p. 


20 p. 


2 


French [or German] 

English 2 p. 

German [or French] 

begun .... 5 p. 
Geometry .... 3 p. 
Physics .... 3 p. 
Botany or Zoology . 3 p. 

20 p. 


Latin, or German, 

or French . . 5 or 4 p. 
English . . . . 3 or 5 p. 
Geometry .... 3 p. 

Physics 3 p. 

History 3 p. 

Botany or Zoology . 3 p. 

20 p. 



REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 211 



PH 


III 




IV 




-«) 


Modern Languages 


English 




>1 


Two Foreig-n Languages (both 


One Foreign Language (Ancient 




Modern) 




or Modern) 






French [or German] 


4 p. 


Latin, or German, or 






English 


3 p. 


French .... 


4 p. 




German [or French] 


4 p. 


English 






Mathematics 




as in others, 3 ") 
additional, 2 j ' 


5 p. 




Algebra, 2 ) 
Geometry, 2 / * " 


4 p. 




Mathematics 






Astronomy (J year) 




Algebra, 2 1 
Geometry, 2 j " " 


4 p. 


3 


and Meteorology 




ayr.) .... 


3 p. 


Astronomy (^ yr.) 






History 


2 p. 


and Meteorology 
(iyr.) .... 
History 
as in Latin-Scien- j 
tific, 2 1 
additional, 2 ' 


3 p. 








3 p. 












20 p. 


30 p. 




French [or German] 


3 p. 


Latin, or German, or 






English 




French .... 


4 p. 




as in Classical, 2 "> 
additional, 2 ( 


4 p. 


English 






as in Classical, 2 1 
additional, 2 / 


4 p. 




German [or French] 


4 p. 




Chemistry .... 


3 p. 


Chemistry .... 


3 p. 




Trigonometry and 




History 


3 p. 


4 


Higher Algebra, 




Trigonometry and 






or History . . . 


3 p. 


Higher Algebra . 


3 p. 




Geology or Physiog- 




Geology or Physiog- 






raphy (J yr. and 




raphy (Jyr.), and 






Anatomy, Physi- 




Anatomy, Physi- 






ology, and Hygiene 




ology, and Hygiene 






Qyr.) .... 


3 p. 


Qyr.) .... 


3 p. 




20 p. 


20 p. 



212 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

the programmes, it being left to local authorities 
to determine how they shall be introduced. 

Inspection will show how carefully the pro- 
grammes have been framed with reference to 
being carried out economically in a single 
school. With few exceptions, the several sub- 
jects occur simultaneously in at least three of 
the four programmes, and with the same num- 
ber of weekly periods allotted to them. From 
a practical point of view this is a most impor- 
tant arrangement. Some minor difficulties 
were caused by adhering to the rule laid down 
by all of the language conferences, namely, 
that two foreign languages should not be 
begun at the same time, and by limiting the 
course to four years. A six years' programme 
would be far easier to construct. 

Critical examination of the committee's pro- 
grammes discloses grave defects in the most 
important of all, the classical, — which does not 
provide continuous study in science, for that 
great department is not represented in the 
third year at all. History is similarly inter- 
fered with, and there would also be a break in 
the mathematical course if the option given in 



KEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 213 

the fourth year were exercised in favor of his- 
tory. The difficulty lies, I believe, in trying 
to include history in a four years' classical 
course. The classics themselves teach history 
in an admirable way, if the instruction is 
good. A wealth of historical knowledge is 
grouped about the reading of Csesar, Cicero, 
and Virgil, Xenophon and Homer, the usual 
secondary school authors ; and in those which 
are themselves professedly historical, a great 
gain would follow from more thorough study 
of the subject matter. If history, then, were 
dropped entirely from this programme, a mod- 
ern language could be begun in the first sec- 
ondary school year, the English course extended 
in the second year, and no break in the science 
instruction would be necessary. 

Defects in the other programmes exist, but 
they are not so glaring as those just pointed 
out in the classical. For instance, there is no 
continuity in the history course of the Latin- 
scientific or modern language programme ; and 
in both of the last-named there would be a 
break in the mathematics course also, should 
the pupil exercise his option in favor of history. 



214 REFOEM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

The following table discloses at a glance in 
what relation the four programmes stand to 
each of the four great divisions of secondary 
school study. The figures in the several col- 
umns represent the total number of weekly 
periods given during the entire four years, in 
each of the four programmes, to the main sub- 
jects. No scheme can be called radical that pro- 
poses to give 52.5 per cent of all secondary edu- 
cation whatsoever to language study, or, adding 
history, 62.8 per cent to the so-called humanities. 
That this would be the result of following the 
committee's recommendations the table shows. 





< 
2 

Q 


o 

fa 






1 


Language 


50 


42 


42 


34 


168 


History 


7 


6 


6 


14 


33 


Mathematics .... 


14 


14 


14 


14 


56 


Natural Science . . . 


9 


18 


18 


18 


63 


Total 


80 


80 


80 


80 


320 



This table brings out other interesting facts. 
It shows how closely allied are the Latin- 



REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 215 






scientific and modern language courses, and 
how small a part natural science is to play in 
the revised scheme, after all. The one-quarter 
of the whole school time that the scientific 
conferences asked to have given to natural 
science is not so given in any of the pro- 
grammes, though it is closely approached in 
three of them. 

Although the report itself contains no refer- 
ence to European experience or practice, it 
will be interesting to compare the committee's 
recommendations with the programmes of Eu- 
ropean secondary schools. Take, for example, 
the Prussian gymnasium, the tertia and se- 
cunda of which nearly correspond to the 
American secondary school years, and the 
French lycee, where the classes known as 
cinquieme, quatrieme, troisieme, and seconde 
are in about the same relation. The division 
of time in these institutions is shown on the 
following page. 



216 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 



PEUSSIAN GYMNASIUM 









CA 








<j 






M 
H 








■< 


55 








« 






o 




Subjects 


H 




02 


g 






ii 


H 


« 


OQ 






s 






P4 






» 


H 


s 


W 


s 




t) 


O 


t^ 


O 


H 


Religion 


2 


2 


2 


2 


8 


German 


2 


2 


3 


3 


10 


Latin 


7 


7 


7 


6 


27 


Greek 


6 


6 


6 


6 


24 


French 


3 


3 


3 


2 


11 


History and Geography . 


3 


3 


3 


3 


12 


Mathematics 


3 


3 


4 


4 


14 


Natural History, Physics, 












and Chemistry . . . 


2 


2 


2 


2 


8 


Total 


28 


28 


30 


28 


114 



FEENCH LTCl&E 









s 


m 




Subjects 








O 


1 




6 


a 


H 


!» 


H 


French 


3 


2 


2 


3 


10 


Latin . 


8 


5 


5 


5 


23 


Greek 


21 


6 


5 


5 


18 


Other Living Language . 


1* 


U^ 


1^ 


^ 


7 


History 


li 


H 


1* 


n 


6 


Geography 


1 


1 


1 


1 


4 


Mathematics \ 
Natural Science j ' ' ' 


li^ 


u 


3 


H 


7J 


Total 


18i 


18^ 


19 


lU 


75J 



1 Greek is not begun until the second half of the year. 
Previous to that time ten hours weekly are given to Latin, 

2 This time is divided between observation lessons on rocks 
and plants and arithmetic. 



REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 217 

It is seen at once that the German boy is 
called upon for far more work, measured in 
terms of time, than the American boy ; though 
the difference is not so great as it seems, for 
"learning lessons" out of school is not so 
prominent a feature in German as it is in 
American education. The French boy, under 
the existing revised programme, does about 
what is to be expected of the American, but 
his time is differently distributed. The French 
device for preventing "scrappy" courses from 
becoming intolerable is to assign them few 
but long periods. For example, history, in 
the lycee, is taught but once a week, but 
then it occupies an hour and a half consecu- 
tively, so that much more is accomplished than 
in two periods of forty -five minutes each. As 
a rule, the recitation or lesson periods in France 
are considerably longer than those that are usual 
elsewhere. 

In spite of the differences between them, 
however, it is clear that the proposed Ameri- 
can classical programme is not very unlike 
those in vogue on the continent of Europe. 
Were the comparison extended to the other pro- 



218 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

grammes, — the Latin-scientific, the modern 
language, and the English, — a similar relation 
to the French and German programmes of like 
character would be found to exist. The higher 
classes of the gymnasium and the lycee have 
still a great advantage over the American 
secondary school in the fact that the work 
leading up to them is carefully organized and 
developed, and may be depended upon. The 
American grammar school, or better, the upper 
grades of the elementary school, on the con- 
trary, is only here and there efficient. For 
two generations the so-called grammar school 
has conspired with the lower or primary grades 
to retard the intellectual progress of the pupil 
in the interest of "thoroughness." The arith- 
metic of many puzzles, the formal grammar, 
and the spelling-book with its long lists of 
child-frightening words have been its weapons. 
Slowly and with a struggle these are being 
wrested from it. New knowledge is being 
introduced to illustrate and illuminate the old, 
and higher processes to explain and make 
easier the lower. All this promotes true thor- 
oughness; and also allows the child's mind to 



REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 219 

grow and develop as nature intended it should, 
and as it often does in spite of the elemen- 
tary school, not because of it. Every year, 
therefore, pupils are reaching the high school 
better prepared for its peculiar work ; and it 
is not unreasonable to hope that in ten years 
the secondary school may assume, in the case 
of its youngest pupils, an ability to use simple 
English correctly, a knowledge of the elements 
of algebra and geometry, and of some epoch 
or movement in history. Perhaps even the 
study of a foreign language will have been 
begun. 

From the standpoint of the elementary 
school, therefore, the Committee of Ten is 
not unreasonable in its ideal, nor have the 
conferences proposed anything that is imprac- 
ticable. The same is true when the report 
is viewed from the standpoint of the colleges, 
though here, too, reform and improvement are 
necessary. As is well known, college admis- 
sion examinations not only differ widely among 
themselves, but vary from year to year. Per- 
haps no one of them is too high to admit of a 
well-taught boy entering college at seventeen, 



220 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

but many are so low that the same boy ought 
to pass them successfully at fourteen, or even 
earlier. The colleges have been injuring higher 
education in America by giving their own idio- 
syncrasies as to admission examinations free 
scope, instead of agreeing together upon a 
policy. 

I do not mean that the admission examina- 
tions of all colleges should be uniform ; that 
is not necessary. But, to quote from the re- 
port, "it is obviously desirable that the col- 
leges and scientific schools should be accessible 
to all boys or girls who have completed cred- 
itably the secondary school course." If the 
recommendations of the Committee of Ten are 
carried out, — and there is every reason to 
hope that they will be, — the "completion of 
a secondary school course" will have a defi- 
nite meaning, and the colleges can deal with 
it accordingly. The graduate of a secondary 
school will have had four years of strong and 
effective mental training, no matter which of 
the four school programmes he has followed, 
and the college can safely admit him to its 
courses. This single step will bring about 



KEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 221 

the articulation of the colleges and scientific 
schools, on the one hand, with the secondary 
schools, on the other, — an articulation that 
has long been recognized as desirable for both 
classes of institutions and for the country. 

The question will naturally arise, — it arose 
in the minds of the Committee of Ten, — Can 
the improvements suggested be effectually car- 
ried out without a very considerable improve- 
ment in the training of the teachers who are to 
do the work ? To this question but one answer 
can be given, and that in the negative. But, on 
the other hand, the opportunities now available 
for the higher training of secondary school- 
teachers are many times as numerous and as 
valuable as they were a decade ago. It is 
true that the hundreds of normal schools are 
accomplishing very little in this direction, even 
the best of them ; but the colleges and uni- 
versities, where the mass of secondary teachers 
will always be educated and trained, have 
nov/ awakened to a sense of the responsibil- 
ity that rests upon them. Harvard and Yale, 
Columbia and Cornell, Michigan and Illinois, 
Colorado and Stanford, and many others have 



222 EEFOKM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

organized special departments for the study 
of education, and one or two of them are 
manned and equipped more thoroughly than 
any similar departments in Europe. The effect 
of this great expansion of activity in the study 
of education cannot fail to be widely felt 
within the next few years. The colleges have 
needed, and some of them still need, an en- 
largement of sympathies, as do the normal 
schools. The colleges have focused their at- 
tention and energy too largely upon their own 
special work, and have paid no heed to what 
was going on about and beneath them. The 
normal schools have thought it sufficient to 
study more or less psychology, and to expound 
more or less dubious "methods" of teaching, 
and have neglected the larger field of genuine 
culture and the relative values of studies. 
Better apparatus and more teachers will not 
of themselves lift the college or the normal 
school out of its rut. Only a full appreciation 
of the relations of these institutions to the 
work of education as a whole can do that. 

Finally, what is the effect of this pro- 
longed and earnest investigation upon that 



REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 223 

ideal of a liberal education that has so long 
been held in esteem among us ? It will not 
have escaped notice that only one of the com- 
mittee's four programmes makes a place for the 
study of Greek, while one excludes both Greek 
and Latin. It is true that these are recom- 
mended as ideal arrangements, and that it is 
expressly stated in the report to be the unani- 
mous opinion of the committee that, "under 
existing conditions in the United States as to 
the training of teachers and the provision of 
necessary means of instruction, the two pro- 
grammes called respectively modern languages 
and English must, in practice, be distinctly 
inferior to the other two." Nevertheless, it 
seems clear that the committee has been able to 
disentangle the real from the accidental in our 
conception of a liberal education, and has put 
the former forward in all its strength. It has 
not forgotten the precept of Aristotle, that 
" there are branches of learning and education 
which we must study with a view to the enjoy- 
ment of leisure," and that "these are to be 
valued for their own sake." "It is evident, 
then," the philosopher continues, "that there 



224 EEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

is a sort of education in which parents should 
train their sons, not as being useful or neces- 
sary, but because it is liberal and noble. 
Whether this is of one kind only, or of more 
than one, and if so, what they are and how they 
are to be imparted, must hereafter be deter- 
mined." It is just this determination that the 
committee has made ; and it is a determination 
that each age, perhaps each generation, must 
make for itself. Between a diminution of the 
time given to classical study and a relapse into 
quasi-barbarism there is no necessary relation 
of cause and effect. May not the American 
say, as did Paulsen of his countrymen, that 
"idealism generally, if we will use this word 
of so many meanings, is a thing which is not 
implanted from without, but grows from 
within, and that, in particular, the idealism in 
the character of the German people has deeper 
roots than the Greek and Latin lessons of our 
gymnasia " ? Is it not true that the other ele- 
ments of culture must be given their proper 
place in secondary education, and that gain 
rather than loss will follow from so doing ? 
Lowell's hope, expressed so eloquently at 



REFOKM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 225 

the Harvard Anniversary, will not be disap- 
pointed by the recognition of a broader basis 
for human culture. Every one may accept the 
recommendations of the Committee of Ten, and 
still say with him : "I hope the day may never 
come when the weightier matters of a language, 
namely, such parts of its literature as have 
overcome death by reason of their wisdom and 
the beauty in which it is incarnated, such parts 
as are universal by reason of their civilizing 
properties, their power to elevate and fortify 
the mind, — I hope the day may never come 
when these are not predominant in the teach- 
ing given here. Let the Humanities be main- 
tained undiminished in their ancient right. 
Leave in the traditional preeminence those arts 
that were rightly called liberal ; those studies 
that kindle the imagination, and through it 
irradiate the reason ; those studies that manu- 
mitted the modern mind ; those in which the 
brains of finest temper have found alike their 
stimulus and their repose, taught by them that 
the power of intellect is heightened in propor- 
tion as it is made gracious by measure and sym- 
metry. Give us science, too, but give first of 



i'' 



226 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 

all, and last of all, the science that ennobles 
life and makes it generous. . . . Many-sided- 
ness of culture makes our vision clearer and 
keener in particulars. For after all, the 
noblest definition of Science is that breadth 
and impartiality of view which liberates the 
mind from specialties, and enables it to organ- 
ize whatever we learn, so that it becomes real 
Knowledge by being brought into true and 
helpful relation with the rest." 



INDEX 



Adams, President Charles Ken- ' Chicago University, 133. 

dall, 167. ! Cicero, 174. 

Aim of education in a demoe- ! Civil Service Reform, 116. 



racy, 112. 

American and German organi- 
zation of higher education 
compared, 135. 

Amiel, 40. 

Apperception, doctrine of, 82. 

Aquinas, Thomas, 39, 50. 

Aristotle, 42, 72, 73, 109. 

Arnold, Matthew, 53; his defi- 
nition of culture, 53; on sec- 
ondary schools, 151. 

Art in education, 22. 

Atomic individualism, 25. 

Augustine, 50. 

Azarias, Brother, 52. 



Bagehot, 103. 
Beethoven, 51. 
Bentham, 70. 
Berkeley, 43. 
Bonnet, 65. 
Bopp, 47. 
Browning, 65. 
Bruno, 42. 
Bryce, James, 105. 
Burgerstein, 75. 
Burke, 106. 

Carlyle, 105. 
Cayley, 45. 
Champollion, 46. 



Collectivism, stagnation the 
result of, 26. 

College, the American, 89, 130; 
distinguished from univer- 
sity, 125; aim of, 131; ad- 
mission examinations, 88, 
221. 

Columbia University, 135, 221. 

Committee of Ten, 189; mem- 
bership of, 191 ; procedure 
of, 192: conclusions of, 203; 
criticism of, 212. 

Comte, 44. 

Condillac, 65. 

Coordination of studies, 202. 

Culture, five aspects of, 17; 
definition of, 33. 



Dante, 38, 48. 
Darwin, 71, 102, 182. 
da Vinci, Leonardo, 51. 
Democracy, progress of, 103; 

literature of, 105 ; relation of 

education to, 108; dangers 

of, 119. 
Demosthenes, 174, 
Descartes, 15, 43, 45. 
de Tocque villa, 103. 
Drawing and constructive 

work, 178. 
du Bois-Reymond, 145. 

227 



228 



INDEX 



Economics, importance of, in 
education, 91. 

Education, definition of, 17; 
basis of, in evolution, 6; as 
adjustment to environment, 
15 ; not identical with in- 
struction, 16; scientific study 
of, 71; threefold approach 
to, 71 ; departments of, in 
colleges and universities, 
221. 

Educational values, standards 
of, 50. 

Einheitsschule, 162, 163. 

Elementary education, scope 
of, 152. 

Eliot, President, 157, 188. 

Emerson, 64. 

Energy and will, 43. 

English, study of, 164, 198. 

Erasmus, 53, 54. 

Ethics and politics, 109. 

Evolution, doctrine of, 4, 14; 
and education, 6, 70. 

** Experience," danger of, in 
education, 77. 

Family, origin of the, 11. 

Fichte, 42. 

Fiske, John, 5, 10, 13, 38. 

Freedom of the will, 64. 

Froebel, 55. 

Froude, 58. 

Galileo, 39. 
Galle, 44. 
Gauss, 45. 

Geography, study of, 168. 
Gladstone, 71. 
Goethe, 33, 48, 177. 
Greek, study of, 172. 
Grimm, 47, 93. 

Gymnasium, table of studies 
in, 216. 



Hall, Dr. G. Stanley, 138. 

Hamilton, Sir William, 50; on 
the study of mathematics, 
170. 

Harris, Dr. W. T., 86. 

Hartwell, Dr. E. M., on physi- 
cal training and play, 181. 

Harvard University, 135, 139, 
141, 155. 

Hawthorne, 65. 

Hegel, 41, 43. 

Helmholtz, 102. 

Herbart, 81, 202. 

Herder, 33. 

Herschel, 102. 

History, study of, 168. 

Hofmann, 145. 

Homer, 48. 

Horace, 17^. 

Humanism, 53. 

Humanitas, 20, 33. 

Humanities, the, 20. 

Huxley, 102, 183. 

Individualism, evils of extreme, 
25. 

Infancy, meaning of, 6 ; in man, 
9, 12. 

Institutional element in educa- 
tion, the, 25. 

Interest, doctrine of, 84. 

Janseu, 39. 

Johns Hopkins University, 135, 
139, 141, 144. 

Kant, 41, 43. 
Kempis, Thomas a, 51. 
Kidd's Social Evolution, 101. 

Lamarck, 42. 
Latin, study of, 172. 
Lecky, W.E. H.,105. 
Leibniz, 43, 45, 71, 88. 
Liberal education, 91, 222. 



INDEX 



229 



Literature in education, 19, 55. 

Lobachevsky, 45. 

Locke, 64. 

Lowell, James Russell, 224. 

Lyce'e, table of studies in, 216. 

LyeU, 102. 

Maine, Sir Henry, 105. 

Man, place of, in the universe, 

.38. 
Mandeville, 70. 

Manual training, 153, 162, 179. 
Mathematics, study of, 170. 
Michael Angelo, 48. 
Mill, John Stuart, 103, 183. 
Milton, 47, 56. 
Modern European languages, 

study of, 177. 
Montaigne, 39. 
Mosso, 75. 
Mozart, 51. 
Miiller, 102. 

National Educational Associa- 
tion, 116, 189, 190. 
Natural science, study of, 172. 
Newton, 45. 
Nordau, 40. 

iraiSeiaf 33. 

Parker, Colonel Francis W., 84. 

Pater, 54. 

Paulsen, Professor Friedrich, 

91, 137, 144, 165, 224. 
Petrarch, 53. 
Phidias, 48. 
Philosophical faculty the centre 

of the university, 144. 
Physical training in education, 

180 : distinguished from play, 

181. 
Physical conditions of sound 

education, 74. 
Plato, 16, 42, 43, 50, 109. 174. 



Play in education, 73; distin- 
guished from physical train- 
ing, 181. 

Politics, participation of edu- 
cated persons in, 109. 

Psychology, relation of, to edu- 
cation, 76. 

Raphael, 48, 51. 

Rayleigh, Lord, 45. 

Rein, 202. 

Religious element in education, 
28. 

Research in American universi- 
ties, 138. 

Riemann, 45. 

Roentgen, 102. 

RoUin, 183. 

Rousseau, 25, 28, 50, 73. 

Royce, Professor Josiah, 80. 

Schelling, 55. 

Scherer, 105. 

Schopenhauer, 40. 

Science in education, 18, 56, 172. 

Secondary education, 151 ; 
scope of, 153; poor teaching 
in, 159; complete in itself, 
154, 207 ; in the United States 
and in Europe compared, 156 ; 
selective function of, 160; 
suggested course of study 
for, 162 ; the pivot of educa- 
tional reform, 187 ; Commit- 
tee of Ten's proposals for, 203. 

Self-activity, 6, 42, 46, 47. 

Shakspere, 47, 48, 51. 

Sociological aspect of educa- 
tion, 86. 

Socrates, 25, 70. 

Sophists, the, 25. 

Sophocles, 174. 

Specialization, dangers of ex- 
cessive, 146. 



230 



INDEX 



Spencer, Herbert, 41, 42, 50. 

Spinoza, 42. 

Spoils system of treating public 

offices, 116. 
Standards, low, of professional 

and technical schools, 142. 
State, the democratic, 110; 

duty of the individual 

toward. 111. 
Sturm, 53. 
Stoy, 202. 
Superior education, scope of, 

152. 
Sylvester, 45. 

Tacitus, 130, 174. 

Teaching in American universi- 
ties, 138. 

Technical schools, influence of, 
on secondary education, 161. 

Ten, Committee of, 189 ; mem- 
bership of, 191 ; procedure of, 
192; conclusions of, 203; 
criticism of, 212. 



Thought, primacy of, 43, 47. 
Tyndall, 61. 

University, definition of, 130; 

no common type of, 127. 
Urbanitas, 33. 
Utility in education, 60. 

Vacation, length of, 157. 
Verner, 47, 93. 
von Baer, 42, 102. 
von Hoist, Professor, on Ameri- 
can universities, 127. 

Wallace, Alfred Russell, 6. 
Warner, Dr. Francis, 75. 
Whewell, 50, 

Will, modern view of, 43 ; free- 
dom of, 64. 
Wundt, 49. 

Ziller, 202. 






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